@nurnberg I'm on my 4th computer as well, just dropped $2000 on it. But I didn't HAVE to. My first PC was a $250 HP that I didn't buy for gaming, I needed it anyway. For just over $100 I added an Nvidia 7950GT and played Sims 2, Supreme Commander, Half Life 2, and others pretty comfortably.

I'm not counting the base cost of the computer, I'm assuming you already have on in the house. A simple off-the-shelf computer probably running a Core 2 Duo, i3 or i5. You're going to have a pretty easy time getting that capable of playing games.

You won't be entering any tournaments with it, nor cranking the settings all the way up, but you'll get a good experience.

If you want to include the cost of equipment you already have, you better include that $1400 HDTV in the price of your console. You can make PC gaming expensive, and you can make console gaming expensive. It's up to you, but neither HAS to be expensive.

@Lhomity Not for sharing an opinion, having a bad opinion. Management trickles down. If this guy has such obviously bad ideas, he shouldn't be in charge. People get fired over their opinions all the time.

Fantastic, no competition means no innovation. Fire this guy.

@twztid13 Are you suggesting I don't pay for everything myself?

My point is most households already have a PC. I have trouble understanding the desire to take fixed-resolution content and simply make it larger. This reduces the sharpness of the content.

And for the record, any time I've plugged my computer into my TV, the picture quality has never been anything short of awesome. Just less sharp than on a smaller screen. I've seen many Samsung TVs that need to be adjusted to make a computer screen look good. Usually requires setting the sharpness setting all the way down, otherwise everything just looks weird. Especially text.

TVs and PCs tend to work against each other unfortunately. If you don't configure both ends correctly, you won't have the best experience.

@twztid13 A GTX 550 will play BF3 on medium for $130. If you're just starting to get into playing games on your PC, medium is plenty. You're not getting any better on a console anyway.

And, I'll point out, most people do not plug their PCs into their TVs.

Consoles are popular because they're familiar.

@twztid13 First, the size of the TV has absolutely nothing to do with performance. Larger screen just means lower pixels per inch.

Second, consoles don't produce 1080p content. Battlefield 3, for example, runs 720p at 30fps. The image is just upscaled to 1080p before it reaches your screen. So run your PC at 1280x720 to get a fair comparison. Plus, the consoles can't achieve all the graphical effects a PC can. They're running on 6+ year old technology. Meanwhile, I'm pushing literally 4 times as many pixels with my 2560x1440 resolution.

I also never said $150 would allow you to run every game at max settings. Most computers off the shelf today will have the CPU, RAM, and HD capacity necessary to run most games reasonably well. Not outstanding, but reasonably well. Power supply might be an issue in some machines though.

Like any hobby, you can dump lots of money into if it is something you're passionate about. But if you just want to play, throwing in a video card is just as reasonable an option as buying a console.

I'm not trying to hate on consoles. You can obviously tell where my allegiance lies, but my point is that PC gaming doesn't have to be expensive. You can pick any hobby and make it expensive.

@nurnberg $150 can upgrade most PCs to play games. Plus, PC games are cheaper. Not usually at launch, but Steam has fantastic sales. The "PC gaming is expensive" myth is just that, a myth. Sure, you can spend lots of money on a gaming PC, just like you can blow tons of money on a console, TV, surround sound, etc.

@The-Neon-Seal Very true. But those of us who actually can fly, it means we can't get roadkills with it.

@y3ivan Large companies like Bioware and Epic can afford to "eat" the tens of thousands it costs them to release free DLCs and patches. Valve could probably absorb the cost too, but they choose not to.

@Haasdude Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all treat their developers like crap. Valve, for example, releases updates to Left 4 Dead 2 far less frequently on consoles than on PC for exactly the same reasons this article mentions. It costs them money to do so. Those L4D2 DLCs that cost you $10 on Xbox are free for PC players, because Microsoft charges Valve to do so. They have publicly admitted they would rather make the DLCs free for everybody.

People complain about Apple's wall-garden, taking 30%, etc. Apple is actually really tame compared to the console makers.