Honestly? Give Up on PC Gaming and Buy an Xbox
By: Owen Williams
Tags: Pc Gaming, Gaming, Xboxseriesx, Playstation 5, Console Gaming

Honestly? Give Up on PC Gaming and Buy an Xbox

Couch gaming is the best gaming

Photo: Phil Barker/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Ever since I could afford to build my own PC, I’ve played games on a desktop computer. But, when the pandemic struck in March and I started working at home, I lost interest in games entirely. I couldn’t bring myself to stay at the same desk for PC gaming after logging off from work.

As the launch of the next-generation consoles, the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, approached, I decided it was time to ditch the desktop and switch to couch gaming.

It’s not that I hadn’t tried to play games from my PC on the TV. Over the years I’ve tried various setups that promise to make my PC act like a console; I tinkered with Steam’s in-home streaming (too unstable and fiddly) and even tried running a ridiculously long HDMI cable to my computer in the office (too messy). Nothing worked well. Getting the game up and running on the TV was a hassle every time, and moving my PC out of the office into the living room wasn’t an option because I need it for coding.

Now that I have my Xbox Series X, I’ve fallen in love with games again, and come to realize what I was missing out on by sticking to PC gaming: being able to just sit down, blob out, and play for a bit

(Your mileage may vary — Wired’s Cecilia D’Anastasio recently made a case for PC gaming from the couch, although it looks anything but comfortable.)

Now that I have my Xbox Series X, I’ve fallen in love with games again, and come to realize what I was missing out on by sticking to PC gaming: being able to just sit down, blob out, and play for a bit. I don’t have to deal with driver updates or tweaking my setup for the best performance, I can just fire up Fortnite or Destiny 2 and play instantly.

People have criticized this generation of consoles for a lack of interesting launch games, but the new games aren’t what was appealing to me. Instead, what’s exciting to me about the Xbox Series X, in particular, is its ability to play thousands of existing games — across every generation of Xbox console — on my giant TV in 4K HDR, at 120hz, without having to poke around to get the right frame rate or setup. New games will be released, but the hardware is solid for years to come.

The Xbox is practically a PC anyway at this point, in both physical size and performance capabilities. Gaming in 4K without dropping frames before now required buying good hardware, building the perfect PC, and configuring it just right — but now I could buy a single box, throw it under the TV, and dive into a game in seconds.

I had hoped that streaming services like Google’s Stadia, which requires just a controller and a dongle on your TV, would be able to pull this off so I could avoid buying a console. But while they’re promising technologies and the performance is solid, the catalog of games just isn’t there yet. Google is slowly adding titles every other week, but it can’t compete with the sheer amount of great games owned by companies like Microsoft and Sony.

That’s why Xbox Game Pass really sealed the deal for me; for a monthly fee, you get access to 150+ games, without having to buy them individually. On the day my Xbox arrived, I opened it and immediately filled the hard drive with games like Halo, Control, and Mass Effect, rather than being stuck with the one or two games I actually own. I had hoped Stadia would be the “Netflix of games,” but it turned out Microsoft did it better, and it made me buy a console.

I used to enjoy the fact that you have total control with a gaming PC and can upgrade the individual parts yourself. Perhaps I’m just getting old, but now I simply want to be able to sit down and play after work, not tinker endlessly. Sure, I could improve my PC gaming experience by getting the latest RTX 3080 graphics card for $699 and have the most powerful gaming rig ever, or I could just buy an entire Xbox for $599 and jump into games when I feel like it and never think of it again, on my couch rather than at my desk.

In a year where I’m spending most of my time in front of a computer at my desk without leaving the house, having a console again has been a fantastic escape from the endless video calls. After work, I commute from my desk to the living room, hit a button to start gaming with my friends, and it all just works.