: I can kind of see how you'd feel that way. I have a harder time seeing how
: you trust that console makers, and MS in particular, will never lock you
: out of "your" content (quotation marks because you won't really
: own it) for whatever reason they want.
: Also, as for PC gaming becoming standardized, how is it not more standardized
: than consoles? Every game nowadays wants x86 or x86-64 and the vast
: majority of everything wants Windows, specifically one of the last two or
: three versions. The hardware can vary way more than any console, but in
: almost all cases, if it works, and it's powerful enough, it doesn't
: matter, assuming it's even a piece of hardware games need.

Todays gaming PC's suffer the same gaming problems I was having in 1998. Maybe even more so. Extreme graphically intensive imagery, lots of physics calculation and high intensity action overpower many low to medium-high end PC's. You either have to turn every graphical option down or even get a GPU that suits your favorite game. Not every GPU will work with every game. One only has to read the GPU error reports and driver updates to know some games work poorly and even not at all on some PC installs. Some games require the best of the best and some don't. A high end gaming PC is going to cost more than either of the new consoles and none of them are identical. The GPU is probably the biggest problem but system bandwidth, total ram, ram speed, CPU speed, CPU cores, CPU multi-threads.

Serious PC gaming is for more for the PC hobbyist who build their own rig from the ground up often including dual SLI GPU. The results are stunning but it comes at a personal/tweaking as well as a financial cost.

I'm never planning to go back to that PC scene. I could never keep my rig up to the standards of the newest games. They were always two steps ahead.