A few weeks ago, I conducted an experiment. A friend of mine was given 3,000 dollars to buy a brand new gaming laptop. We decided to try and match one to current gaming spec, and we used Watch_Dogs as our measuring stick. Unfortunately, we were in for a bit of a harsh surprise. We literally couldn’t find processors or graphics cards good enough to meet the recommended specs for the game. Our only choice was to include multiple discrete graphics cards working at once. We decided to try again with a desktop and had more success, but we still had to drop way more money than we wanted to.
For a while, PC gaming was catching up to console gaming. The massive indie sphere gave it a huge leg up, and for the past few years basically any rig could run any game that came out. Heck, my rig is 7 years old and it was able to play BioShock Infinite on decently high settings. Users had to worry less about specs and upgrading and for a few years could concentrate on what is really important: the games.
However, with our leap to the next generation of consoles, the system requirements for many of our PC games have gone up. For most rigs, this is still handle-able. My 7 year old toaster can still run Titanfall for example. However, we are starting to edge into the realm of major monetary upgrades, or new rigs all together. Very few people will be willing to drop another 2000 just to be able to play Watch _Dogs .
This, of course, will put paranoia into the PC gaming community again. People will start wondering when their rigs will become out of date, and how much money they will have to spend just to be able to keep up with the times. This will drive a wedge between the PC and console gaming communities and since Steam is still the best platform for indie games, this will also drive a wedge between the mainstream and indie gaming communities, as if that wedge wasn’t big enough.
For PC gaming to be accessible to the masses, there has to be some sort of standardization of specs. To be fair, that still might be the case. We have seen other games, like Call of Duty: Ghosts , advertise absolutely crazy recommended specs as well. This simply may be the point in which the PC gaming “generation” switches over.
But unfortunately, this is going to happen a LOT slower than the console turnover. You see, dropping 400 bucks on a new console is nothing compared to getting a whole new computer. There is no upgrading needed, no microelectronic work, no finicky OSs. All you do is plug in and go. You can turnover a console generation all at once, while PC users will slowly leak in to the “new generation” as their old rigs crap out on them.
And this all started because Ubisoft’s new game Watch_Dogs takes a jet engine to run…
What do you think? Is the cost of upgrading too prohibitive for PC gaming? Let us know in the comments.