I’ve been an avid PC gamer because the early Nineteen Nineties. My first laptop, purchased particularly to play Star Wars: X-Wing, was a plucky 486DX working at 33MHz (cutting-edge on the time — properly, solely behind the 486DX2, however that was too expensive). I’ve fond recollections of enjoying Doom on the workplace LAN and getting hooked on Quake when on-line gaming started (due to QuakeWorld, which made dial-up modem play viable versus an utter lag-fest).
I may ramble on with nostalgic gaming recollections, however the level is I performed Quake obsessively — to a excessive aggressive stage in a clan — then I lived and breathed EverQuest for a number of years, and down the road, I used to be completely misplaced in World of Warcraft for an additional few years, and so forth.
I’ve all the time been a PC gamer, by way of and thru — I did swear off MMORPGs, thoughts, as I can not be trusted to not lose giant chunks of my life to them. From time-to-time, I’ve owned a console too, however it’s all the time been by backup, second-string gaming machine, used sparingly.
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Not anymore, although. My PC is now used only for work, and I have not performed a sport on it for a yr or so.
I’m now, formally, a PS5 gamer. A console is my essential gaming machine for the primary time in my life. So, how did that occur?
A vow revoked and a lesson discovered
If you occur to have learn my previous articles, you might recall that on the finish of 2024, I vowed I wasn’t going to buy a PS5 Pro last year. My masterplan was to avoid purchasing a new console, and use my gaming PC on the main TV in the living room for couch co-op sessions with my wife instead, while still being able to game in the study with my computer if I wanted.
Then came Black Friday in November of 2025, and I did a complete 180. I pulled the trigger on a good deal on a PS5 Pro bundle.
What changed during the course of 2025? Firstly, I realized that running cables from a PC in the study through to the living room TV is more of a hassle than I’d anticipated. Getting everything set up at the end of each week, ahead of my weekend gaming sessions, quickly became tiresome.
Moreover, I found my long HDMI cable wasn’t reliable enough. The picture on my Sony OLED TV kept flickering, which was maddening, frankly. And for no apparent reason, too — sometimes it’d happen, sometimes it wouldn’t. I never found out why. I also had occasional issues with my game controllers (typical PC hardware gremlins that were perfectly resolvable, but still a pain).
On top of that, having held off on buying a GPU upgrade for my PC — my plan for the money I would’ve spent on a PS5 (and did eventually spend on the console) — I was put off by issues around the RTX 5070 when it arrived. This was the graphics card I really had my eye on, but it was a disappointing incarnation in terms of its performance upgrade (and that 12GB of VRAM). The initial above-MSRP price only rubbed salt into these wounds.
The prices of AMD’s rival GPUs were off-putting, too, in the early days of RDNA 4 — although that did change, and I came close to buying an RX 9070 XT when pricing finally settled down.
However, at that point, it was too late. I was already frustrated with my whole piping-the-PC-from-the-study situation, and by the time that Black Friday PS5 Pro bundle bargain popped up (it really was a great deal), I just couldn’t resist.
I absolutely don’t regret that decision, nor am I upset about buying a console with the money that was earmarked for upgrading my ailing RTX 2060 Super. That’s not to say I don’t miss some things about PC gaming, or that I’m not super-annoyed about Sony’s latest stunt regarding discs.
I’m going to cover both sides of this gaming coin here. First, I’ll tell you why I’m loving my time with the PS5 Pro now, before discussing what I don’t like on the Sony side of the fence, and the clear, undeniable strengths of PC gaming.
PlayStation bliss
I did own a PS4 Pro before — as my second-string gaming device, backing up my PC — and it’s striking just how much slicker the PS5 Pro is. For one thing, I found my PS4 Pro to be the noisiest console I’ve ever had, by far. It was noisier than any PC I’ve owned, and some vacuum cleaners for that matter.
The PS5 Pro is nicely quiet, super-fast to boot up, and more importantly to wake and sleep. This means it’s dead easy to fire up the console for a very quick gaming session if I only have 10 minutes to spare and just want to dip into something briefly, or to pause a session (put the console in rest mode) if I need to pop out. It all feels very seamless, and there’s not a snaking USB extension cable or HDMI lead in sight.
The PS5 has reminded me just how good couch co-op can be, and I’ve been enjoying indie games like Dysmantle, which has same-screen co-op (like Baldur’s Gate 3). We’ve been playing a bunch of these games — it’s the Diablo 4 expansions next, if you’re curious (we played the base game on PS4, so I’m keen to see how good the game looks on its successor console).
The PS5 controllers were an unexpected bonus, too. They’re so much better than the PS4, and they even fit my wife’s smaller hands (she finds many controllers too big and painfully cumbersome, but not the DualSense).
Of course, a clear benefit of the PS5 over the PC is that there’s no messing about with GPU drivers. By which I mainly mean poring through Reddit ‘megathreads’ worrying about whether the latest Game Ready installment is actually going to be a step backwards for my PC, perhaps in terms of performance for a particular game or bugs (or broken features). Windows 11 bugs are another issue, too. (Yes, there can be software glitches on the PlayStation, but nothing like what some PC gamers must endure at times.)
Then there’s the RAM crisis. Buying PC components is just getting more and more painful. Obviously RAM and SSD prices are through the roof already, but PC gamers waiting on a GPU upgrade (as I was) are facing unpleasant hikes due to the price of video memory (VRAM). Indeed, the latest rumor from YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed is potential worth hikes to the tune of 40% in some circumstances with Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Add loads of seasoning with that assertion, after all, however it’s clear sufficient that GPUs are getting pricier as a consequence of VRAM will increase, particularly for graphics playing cards loaded up with extra of this reminiscence (naturally). CPUs are in line to get costlier, too.
The disaster basically is predicted to accentuate as this yr rolls on, and 2027 could possibly be worse nonetheless — maybe the worst ever yr for the reminiscence business, alarmingly. With no have to improve my desktop, I’m glad to be out of this gloomy surroundings of spiraling prices. The scenario has turned planning PC improve paths, which was a moderately enjoyable, generally even thrilling, train, right into a totally miserable expertise.
You may now be shouting at your display screen about Sony climbing PlayStation costs, too, and that is a good level. But I will not have to fret about upgrading my console, and it’ll fortunately sit in my lounge for the following few years, blissfully not needing any new parts (whereas my work PC can keep it up fortunately with its RTX 2060 Super).
Granted, that is simply my private scenario, and if you’re desirous about shopping for a Sony console, with the brand new worth of the PS5 Pro, I do not know if I’d suggest pushing for it over the vanilla PS5 now. (I acquired mine on sale for about 60% of the present lowest retail worth). The base PS5 continues to be an amazing console, although, and it will seemingly make much more sense for the typical gamer — particularly come Black Friday, when optimistically, there will be some good offers round as soon as once more.
PC robust fits
There are variety of plus factors for PC gaming versus consoles, in order promised, I’ll look at the opposite aspect of the equation right here, and select what I significantly miss.
There are some notable downsides with console gaming, together with that you might want to pay for a subscription to entry on-line multiplayer (in the primary, though clearly that does not embody free video games like Fortnite). This doesn’t bother me personally because I don’t really play online anymore — as I said early, it’s mostly about local co-op for me these days. But I totally get why having to pay for a monthly plan irks gamers who want to play the latest shooter, strategy epic, or whatever else, online.
What does bother me, though, is the price of the actual games on the PlayStation. One of the major strengths of the PC is that games are cheaper than they are on console, from big-name releases (which still command a weighty premium… just not as hefty as on consoles) through to a raft of indie titles, which are often very competitively priced.
Not only this, but you get regular Steam sales where some games get huge discounts (and you can pick up older titles in particular for a song), or value-crammed GOG bundles, and also the likes of Epic giving away some compelling offerings for free. You don’t get any of this on the PlayStation, and Sony’s store does seem to like to charge a lot, even for older titles. For me, this is probably the biggest drawback with shifting over to being a PS5 gamer.
A recent development compounded the situation, too, when we learned that Sony is doing away with physical discs for the PlayStation. I was already aware of the situation with the price of PlayStation games, of course, which is why when I bought my PS5, I chose a bundle with a disc drive.
That meant I could pick up, for example, the physical disc copy of Split Fiction for 40% less than the digital copy on the PlayStation Store. I can also currently purchase second-hand, older games on disc at a considerable saving. But all these possibilities are heading rapidly out the window when 2028 rolls around, and Sony enacts its plan to push physical media completely aside with the PlayStation.
I won’t go into this controversy in depth here – we’ve covered it extensively elsewhere — but suffice it to say that I’m not happy about the idea at all, and it feels like a cynical and generally anti-consumer practice. And no matter how many gamers sign petitions (here have been a lot) it doesn’t seem like Sony is going to backtrack on this one (aside from maybe niche collector’s editions or the like, and if we’re lucky enough to get those, they will of course cost a fortune).
You could argue that the PC is digital-only already: desktops don’t come with disc drives anymore, those days are long gone. But what Sony is doing is quite different, given that PC gaming is an open platform bristling with different stores and options for digital purchases, whereas Sony has the PlayStation ecosystem locked down to its store. With physical media banished, a key choice and avenue for money-saving (don’t forget, you can also recoup money by selling on your disc copy of a game) is removed, and Sony has an unhealthy level of control over the whole shooting match.
Okay, so I don’t feel like the PlayStation disc drive I bought is useless — it’ll be good for a long while yet, and I’ll still be able to play older games on it, including my PS4 back catalog, plus I can use it for Blu-rays. Regardless, this Sony decision is a painful kick in the shin.
Finally, another obvious plus point for PC gaming is the variety of mods floating around and customization possibilities in general, which you don’t get with a console. The PC is quite simply a more open platform all-round — although in my case, modding isn’t something that I’m all that into anyway.
Disc-less Elysium
Let me finish by pointing out the obvious: a lot of this is very subjective. You may have quite different opinions. You might live and breathe mods. You might want games to look out-of-this-world, with visual options cranked to the max (and be able to afford the necessary PC hardware to achieve that). You may never want to play a shooter without a mouse and keyboard (I get that one, but I’m okay with a controller now — and I don’t play competitively anymore).
You may never, ever, abandon your gaming PC. They may have to extract it from your cold, hardened claws after rigor mortis has set in, having expired clutching the object you love most in the world, in the hopes somehow taking it with you into the afterlife.
The point is, there are all sorts of pros and cons to be tailored for your own personal take on the gaming PC versus console debate. But for me, I’m really happy with my PS5 and I am looking forward to enjoying my living room, and co-op, gaming experiences for years to come… discs or no discs.
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