Every Time I Try PC Gaming, I

Reviewing PCs and laptops is a big part of my work, and it’s arguably my favorite. While it can be frustrating to give up my usual desk setup to test a laptop, it’s always fun to get something new, see how it performs and what it looks like. I’ve reviewed many a gaming laptop, too, and I always try to deliver a fair and realistic assessment of what those devices offer. But to be honest, gaming PCs are usually some of my least favorite to review.

Don’t get me wrong, I love gaming — I just vastly prefer console gaming. And every time I have to try PC gaming for a review, I’m reminded of why playing on my Nintendo Switch is so much less frustrating. Let’s talk about it.

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Controls

PC gaming is a little too complicated for me

The first thing I don’t really like about playing games on a PC is the fact that controls are often more complicated than I’d like them to be. A keyboard has dozens of keys placed into lines, in positions that aren’t really designed for you to need to press multiple keys at the same time. Sure, you can get used to it and change the controls, but playing most games on a keyboard is just so cumbersome.

Controllers have just the right amount of buttons to do all the actions you’re expected to do in a modern game (of course, games are designed around them), and they’re all placed in easily accessible locations so you can play in a very comfortable way. And while traditional PC controls can sometimes offer more precision thanks to the mouse, console controllers have benefits like analog movement and, outside of Xbox, gyro aiming, which helps compensate for the lack of a mouse.

Of course, you can always use a controller for PC gaming, but if it’s not an Xbox controller, that can be an involved process. And, as I’ve found while playing Fire Ring on some gaming handhelds, sometimes button prompts will still be shown as if you were using a keyboard, so you’re left to figure out what button you’re supposed to press.

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So many pop-ups

I just want to play

Playing games on a PC also gets frustrating when it feels like there’s so much demanding my attention (or my data). I mostly use Steam for gaming, and I’ve had that account for years. To me, it seems logical that already having a Steam account would be enough to get me into most games, but a lot of companies have developed a frustrating habit of trying to get me to sign up for whatever garbage account system they’re offering. And many times, they want to force me to link those accounts.

It’s so annoying trying to launch a game like Cyberpunk 2077 and having another launcher pop-up that only contains CD Project Red titles. I can’t launch Forza Horizon 5 without the Steam Overlay being forced on me to ask me to link my Xbox and Steam accounts (the Steam account is shared, so I can’t do that). Even games I really like, like Shadow of the Tomb Raiderhave the annoying quirk of opening a little menu instead of the actual game where I can change most of the settings that the launch menu has anyway. Steam itself gets a little annoying, opening its sales highlights every time I launch the app for the first time. For most of my titles on the Nintendo Switch, all I need to do is press A and the game loads and I can play it.

Live service games are kind of a beast of their own with their account system, which is just as annoying on consoles as it is on PCs. Maybe the problem is that I’m playing the wrong games on PC, but I never have to deal with these frustrations on my console.

Compatibility and settings

You never know what you’re going to get

Finally, the biggest thing about PC gaming is how you just never really know if something is going to work for you, or what you have to do to make it work decently well. With a console, games are really straightforward. Every game is designed for the same hardware, and any review online will tell you if the game looks good, runs well, or is buggy. The simplicity of having a single platform that games are developed for makes it pretty easy to know what to expect.

PC gaming, however, is a mess. Almost any PC can try to play any game, and that theoretically gives you a nearly infinite library. But whether it will actually be playable is kind of up in the air. This has become much more true with the rise of PC gaming handhelds, which are severely underpowered compared to traditional gaming PCs, and thus can only run a lot of modern games at lower resolutions and graphical settings, often requiring you to fiddle with those settings in the menu until you get decent performance. But of course, a lot of PCs will have the same problem of trying to figure out the right settings for your configuration.

And that’s when the games run at all. With the advent of Arm-powered laptops like the Surface Laptop 7, many may now expect to play their games on these new machines, not knowing the potential compatibility issues of the Arm architecture. Most games will run at lower settings on these PCs, but as we’ve seen with titles like Forza Horizon 5some games just won’t run, or even install. It always feels like a gamble trying to get a game running on your PC.

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There’s still something else on this note, though, which is a bit harder to pinpoint. I’m currently working on a review of another PC gaming handheld, and trying to play Fire RingI first played on the maximum preset at 2560×1600 resolution. This is on integrated graphics, and if you know the power of these processors, you know this shouldn’t run smoothly at all. However, the game run at a very stable 30 frames per second. So I changed the quality to the lowest possible setting, and — lo and behold — the (nearly) exact same 30FPS. That should never happen in a game. And if you think that’s a one-off, I just recently had a friend of mine with a Dell XPS 15 laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU try to play Hunt: Showdown. The game refused to run smoothly at max settings, so he turned them all the way down; nothing changed.

PC gaming is very often a mystery, and I’m simply not interested in dealing with it.

PC gaming isn’t bad, it simply isn’t for me

I’m sure my words will have some diehard defenders of PC gaming mad at me, but I’m not here to say whether you should stop playing games on your PC or not. There are benefits to PC gaming, too, with rhe largest number of games on any platform, more customizable controls, and, if you have the right hardware, graphical fidelity consoles simply can’t match.

But playing games on PC just gives me a headache, especially when I’m trying to do it so I can do my job. Having annoying pop-ups, cumbersome controls, and just trying to figure out why a game isn’t working or behaving as expected is incredibly tiring. If you have the time and patience to deal with those things, that’s great. I just don’t.