PC Gaming is Ruined by PCs

My son spent the weekend thoroughly enjoying Spider-Man 2 on PC, having counted down the days until its release.

What both us did not enjoy was getting our gaming PC working well enough for him to play the game after he purchased it.

Let us ignore that Sony had pre-order bonuses listed in the description for weeks before release, only for the game to never be available for pre-order.

Instead let us focus on the joy of PC gaming in 2025.

• Windows is awful. Despite everything working fine for multiple years hence, it decided to forget my login PIN code and all of my Microsoft login details. This would have been less of an issue had it not decided to remind him of this fact in the middle of playing the game - throwing up a OneDrive login screen right over the face of Spider-Man.
• On some days, the machine refused to switch on at all. Simply beeping error codes. Other days it turned on instantly. Off and on a few times and it always eventually started.
• GeForce graphics driver updates wanting me to update the updater before it could do the update. For some reason the previous updater, which has always updated successfully, decided it was no longer capable of updating without being updated.
• The heat coming off the thing (CyberPower gaming PC with a GeForce 3080 from 2022)... wow.

The "I cannot get the machine to come on" problem was so bad one day that I actually considered just buying a PS5 (we have a PS4), getting a refund from Steam, and purchasing the game again. It seemed like it would be less of a hassle than dealing with a PC.

Then I looked and found that there is almost no exclusive titles for the PS5 at all. Wikipedia lists just a little over 30. And apart from Astro Bot, not one of them seemed like it would be our second game purchase. Remind me why people are such ardent Sony fans? The list of Xbox exclusives is surely longer than this?

I am well aware of the broad range of available PC titles which never come to console. But none of this did anything to dissuade me from the fact that playing on console is still a far friendlier experience.

And playing on console is also a hellzone! Of too many logins and signup processes and cross-console network play incompatibilities that surely of no benefit to anyone in this decade.

PC gaming is ruined by the reality of PCs.

Console gaming is ruined by having to constantly sign up or sign in to things.

Mac gaming is ruined by Apple.

It is no wonder that so many people bought a Switch.