I hear a lot of people use the size argument. They want to play the game on a big HDTV, but honestly it's all in perspective. You know that thing where you put your fingers right in front of your face and center them over someone's head and can pretend your squishing it? Well, my 24" monitor a foot from my face looks about a good as my 50" TV 8' across the room. Honestly, by perspective the monitor is probably actually larger (takes up more of my physical field of vision) and being up close I can actually notice the details more than a giant picture across the room.

To add onto what Lionx said about the TV tuners for PCs, I'll take it a step further. My monitors are 1080p with HDMI inputs and a quick switch so I can switch between inputs. I can just have my Direct TV receiver plugged into one of my monitors (secondary usually) and watch TV on it right next to the game I'm playing on my primary while easily being able to switch it back to my PC input if I want to use it (or just use my laptop if I have it sitting at the table. It's becoming common for monitors to have HDMI inputs these days.

His points about pricing are pretty spot on. If you're a savvy consumer you can spend relatively little on a very good video card that will last for years. I personally shop well under top of the line with the intention of replacing it every 2 or so years and filtering the older cards into newly built (but cheaper and less up-to-date) PCs for other uses or to give to family members. RAM is almost dirt cheap and if you are smart enough to get a good MoBo you will be able to upgrade all of the rest of your rig for many years before having to replace it.



I love PC gaming, but I understand the downside for many. You don't just plug it in, pop in the game and go. I remember reading about Best Buy offering a service at around $150 to install your PS3 for you. It's stupidity tax. Sure that's ridiculous to us, but in reality console gaming is not so different. Console games are easy to manage.

If you're so inclined you could easily build a great gaming rig and run the right types of cables and play your game on your big HDTV from the couch with your PC (I do), but it's a lot of effort and requires some know-how. Time is money and it's easier to spend on consoles and not have to deal with it. Even I agree with this. I sometimes just want it to pop in and go.

It makes sense of developers to push titles to something like this. The hardcore PC gamer is a rarified market full of geeks. Geeks aren't sexy. You can't make gaming mainstream (read: more profitable) if you're catering to the geekiest people. Devs are going to broaden it out and make the best experience for people who are buying consoles and already have the exact pre-set hardware to make it work just by popping a disc in.

For me, I probably love PC gaming more, but as a result of the climate in gaming pushing towards consoles (which means substandard ports to PC), I'll play games made for the console on a console even if it costs me 10 bucks more in some cases. Sad, but true. Just like some people don't wanna fight with a PC to play a game, I don't wanna fight with a shoddily remapped control scheme.