Me after getting tired of PlayStation plus.
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I’ve played games on PC since I was four years old and never stopped. DOS/Win3x era hardware but nobody recalls the specs, idk. My first console was a used NES from a garage sale with a handful of games around age 6 my uncle bought me, and then I bought an N64 with allowance after saving up for a year. It came bundled with Diddy Kong Racing as my first 3D game. I was 7 or 8 years old then. I skipped the 16bit console era, same with handheld. Used GBC straight to buying an NDS. I always had a PC, and then since I had a lot of expendable money as a teen with a job I bought every major console new and old including retro plus some flops. Bought used games at first until the retro market got too expensive in the 2010’s, then bought flashcarts and optical drive emulators.
I stopped buying consoles because I stood firm on refusing to pay to play online combined with exclusives losing importance since 8th gen. As a consequence, I favored spending my time PC gaming more and more over time. I had Xbox consoles but only used after support ended. Same with Sony, for the PS4. Never bought a PS5. I was the PC+Nintendo guy then, at first. Since Iwata died, I feel like the soul of Nintendo died with him. The Switch hardware felt pretty lifeless, but the games were still good. The Switch 2…I’m not sure, the games released so far have not impressed me. So, that’s my last console I think. PC only from here on.
I sold all my consoles except my Switch 2 a few years ago and moved entirely into software emulation. Oh and I didn’t sell my PC Engine Duo either, I just think it’s neat.
I didn’t decide. I was born one.
Decide? Didn’t have a console for most of my childhood.
My first console was a Wii when I was ~25. Other than that it was PC/Commodore since I was about 3 years old.
When I could finally afford my own machine instead of whatever hand-me-down electronics I got from friends. It just always made sense to me
Always have been, we didn’t have consoles apart from the NES in the early 90s.
when my parents bought my cousin’s used Commodore64 in 1991
When I got the captain keen floppy for free for my 386.
When my mom refused to buy a console, but would happily buy a PC, because PCs can be used for other things than gaming.
Worked out for her, I became a software engineer.
Same for me, with the exception of an Atari 2600 because she liked pacman. By the time I was old enough to remember playing it, it was already extremely outdated.
I am not sure where our C64 was on the scale of computing, TBH. The only thing it was exceptional at was gaming, but it is where I got exposed to BASIC and how filesystems worked.
Our TRS-80 was a really fancy paperweight and still not sure what it was actually used for, to this very day.
Our 286 is where the magic really started and that is when I truly began to disregard consoles. (Consoles were still cool and I still wanted one, but Space Quest or LSL were still just fine.)
i stopped being a pc gamer about 9 years ago and have no desire to become one ever again.
Slinging 3.5" floppies in the basement, executing the games from DOS. Playing Doom with my dad: He would work the movement controls, and I got to press Ctrl to shoot!
When… when I got a PC, of course. I didn’t even know “cd” as a command yet, so X-Wing went straight to the root of the C drive. So did Battlechess.
The dudes at Radio Shack were very chill about reinstalling DOS and Tandy Deskmate.
1998
Generally speaking, I knew PC gaming would open me up to a lot of titles unavailable elsewhere. I’d briefly played Duke Nukem 3D at someone’s parents house and holy shit you can see nude women in PC games? Sign me up!!!
But it wasn’t until the high school I was about to start attending sent parents letters saying student’s reports would need to be typed going forward that I was able to convince my mom to finally get a PC. I immediately got Command & Conquer and Half-Life and HOLY SHIT people do something called “modding” and you can play the game in endless different ways, making my original purchase give me access to potentially limitless content?
Almost 30 years later and I’m still regularly playing Half-Life mods and I work in IT.
Exactly the same time you did.
I started gaming less consistently so paying for Xbox live didn’t make sense for me anymore. I switched to mainly playing my PS3 because the online was free.
When Sony announced they were charging for online play, I bought a gaming PC instead of an Xbox One or PS4. At that point, the line between console and PC barely existed anymore. I already pay for internet, no reason I should have to pay again just to use it for gaming.
Around 1994 (give or take ) my school took us into the computer room to play Oregon trail with the 5.25 disks. It was a magical time.
Halo 5. When I played it on the Xbox one I remember thinking to myself, “why the fuck did they release this for such shitty hardware? I spent $60 for this experience?” At the time of its release, it would have looked and performed so much better on PC. There were moments they had some kind of dynamic filtering going on that made the scene just look like total garbage just so the game wouldn’t dip below 30fps. I’ve always been a bit of a halo fanboy, so this game really hit my feels.
I learned shortly after how this practice is pretty normal for most consoles, going back for a while, and it’s just how it is when you can’t upgrade the internal specs every year. I was like “why are we limiting ourselves when there are better options, why can’t consoles be more modular?” and became a full pc gamer after that. Already was a PC gamer, but just not as focused as I am after that. I try my best to convince my nephews of the superiority of PC gaming, but I think for some, it just takes some personal experience to figure it out.
