If Gaming is Really About the Games, then the PC is King
/PC vs. console articles are clunky and bloated, and there sure are a lot of them. This will be another one of those articles, but lets see if we can't keep it from being ugly and boring. We'll skip the 'consoles and PC have their own strengths and weaknesses' bit, whiz through 'it depends on what you want to accomplish' and move straight to 'if you like games, then this is why you should be a PC gamer'.
If you don't like losing access to your games, then you should be a PC gamer. That's it. No song and dance bullshit about 'cheaper more powerful blah blah blah'. No. None of that is relevant. "What about not having to pay for online play?" Irrelevant!
Console games are tied to specific console generations. If your PS3 breaks, or you don't have the room in your entertainment center to keep it around, then you miss out on those great games that you might still want to enjoy. If you love a PS3 game but it doesn't run very well, and there's no 'next-gen' re-release, then you're stuck with that sub-par performance no matter what you do. Essentially, you play what you're given by the likes of Sony and you better like it, because unless you go to someone else, you have no say.
Related: Corporate intellectual property: Continued access after the company has lost interest
Even when a game is re-released on the new hardware, consumers are forced to buy the game all over again for the privilege of continuing to enjoy the product they've already paid for - while losing any progress they've made in the game to date. Like a game from a few generations ago? You'd better hope it's available for purchase on PSN or XBL.
Meanwhile, a PC game will always be available to download and play, on any PC, no matter how much new hardware becomes available. Age of Empires 2 was released in the days of the original PlayStation, but I can pop an original CD into my PC today and have it run just as it would have the day I bought it. Try that with the original Croc or Spyro games. Remember those? Oh man!
If I don't have a PC that can run The Witcher 3 on max settings, or I can't quite run Cities Skylines at 60fps today, I will be able to run it better with tomorrow's similarly-priced components. I'm not trapped at that sub-par performance. If PC makers followed Sony's example with the PS4 Pro, then older games would need to be patched by the developer (which would have likely moved on to newer projects) to be able to take advantage of newer hardware, leaving potential for a better gameplay experience untapped, simply because Sony didn't want to do the work in natively allowing access to all of the new hardware. While it’s true that ‘Boost Mode’ allows games to make use of the extra power, the benefits vary game by game. So much for ‘double the horsepower’.
You might think that backwards compatibility leaves my argument moot but back compat still relies on the console maker and what they say you’re allowed to play. Microsoft didn’t suddenly make every Xbox and Xbox 360 game playable on the Xbox One; you have to wait for them to patch it in, game by game.
In conclusion; get a PC. You'll get the benefits of {everything that you've heard a million times before} and you won't be leaving it to some faceless corporation, who couldn't care less about you, to decide what you're allowed to play.
