“I’ve never seen women play any games except all these games I’ve seen them play, but that doesn’t count because reasons”
Bonus points for transphobia and ableism.
Fuck people who think like this. TIL that only men play lots of genres of games, which is news to me because the majority of my male friends only play shooters and one plays nothing but… wait for it… RPGs.
G*mers are a mistake.
Oh, the PCMR types are definitely a minority of people who play on PC. PC is definitely my preferred platform for strategy games, but anything besides that I play on console. Sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand just feels like how I’m supposed to play shooters or RPGs.
And I think modding is really an amazing scene. Sure, there’s bad mods, but in general mods as a concept, and often as an execution, are fantastic. Beyond the obvious political aspects of “who would work voluntarily under gommunism?!”, they democratize the gaming experience and can make it much more cooperative between developer and players.
At the same time though, in terms of mass accessibility consoles are an achievement. They’re the iphone of the gaming world - they just (usually) work. No need to download a mod manager and queue up your mods so that dragons don’t spawn in your house or whatever. That’s part of why Cyberpunk was such a failure: you assume a base level of playability with a game released for your console. That peace of mind was shattered.
The issue is that everything about consoles is expensive. I’m not a hardcore gamer or whatever so I’m not gonna spend a few hundred euros for a console only to then have to buy every game I want to play. Like, yeah, maybe I will be slightly limited in terms of what games I can play in my computer compared to consoles, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff for not having to pay. This is why I don’t think consoles are as accessible. It’s like, PC is good for people who want to spend either 0 or thousands of dollars and consoles are for people who want to spend hundreds of dollars.
That, to me, is why it’s accessible for more people: for $400 you get a machine that will get you 5-8 years worth of useful life. It’s a walled garden, but it’s a damn big walled garden. And you don’t have to worry about checking specifications, you don’t have to worry about shady sites for pirating your games, you don’t have to be annoyed by needing to upgrade one item to run a game. For an additional $60 you get a AAA title that should, in theory, work, plus you can pay for access to a huge backlog.
Now, that costs more than PC can for games, but in return you get convenience. For many people, that’s a good trade.