As someone who has been gaming my whole life, but only got a PC over a year ago, PC gaming has turned out to be much cheaper and easier to use than I previously believed. I’m not the only console gamer that has had this experience, but there are still plenty more that won’t make the transition because they worry about the ease of use. Now, with my new experience, I can speak to some of the myths about PC gaming that have continued to circulate, despite them being clearly untrue. Since this is based on my own experience, and I bought a prebuilt gaming PC, I’m not going to discuss building a PC from scratch, although having changed out a component or two on my rig, I feel confident that I will eventually build one.
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4 Driver updates and the tedium of getting games to work
For as often as I heard about updating Drivers, I haven’t had to do it manually once
Tech troubleshooting is one of the biggest myths about PC gaming, and while there are obviously some tech issues that happen with a Windows PC, I’ve had a really smooth experience. I haven’t had to update my RTX card or AMD manually once, as my computer will always notify me when there is an update ready. While I have had to fight my PC a few times while working, including it booting into BIOS more often than I would like, I have had basically no issues running games on it. Even in cases where I have to jump through some extra hoops to play a prerelease game on my rig, the process has been incredibly easy every time. I don’t expect it to work perfectly all the time, because the consoles crash occasionally too, but it’s been a far more easygoing experience than I was led to believe.
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3 Bad PC ports are real, but less common than I expected
There are plenty of high profile bad ports, but it’s mostly just PlayStation
Bad PC Ports were extremely common in the early parts of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation, in the 2007-2009 timeframe. That was at a time when gaming publishers and developers were attempting to write off the PC platform due to piracy issues, but ultimately gave up that fight and started treating PC ports like a worthwhile venture that should be done correctly. In 2025, that’s basically not true, although there is one exception that stops it from being only the rare exceptions. For whatever reason, PlayStation cannot seem to make good PC ports (via GameRant), in what is either true incompetence, or a distain for the platform, but outside of Helldivers 2, tons of PC ports, like the Marvel’s Spider-Man games and The Last of Us games being examples of particularly bad ports. Outside of them, if a PC game is poorly optimized, its usually poorly optimized across all platforms.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- Released
- October 20, 2023
2 Expensive Hardware
While starting from nothing is more expensive than buying a console, it’s not as bad as I thought
PC gaming is undoubtedly more expensive when it comes to hardware than consoles. There are some reasons why that isn’t that big of an issue, like a PC having more functionality outside of gaming, but it’s actually not that bad, if you know what to look for. Yes, an RTX 5090 is going to run you between $2,000 and $3,000 at the moment, but that’s also the newest card and the highest end version of it. My pre-built, which came with 16 GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and an AMD Ryzen 7 7700, for just over $1,200. When I finally reach the point that I need to upgrade some of these components, I will be able to buy components that are better, but not the newest and best, for a more reasonable price. I had thought I would need upwards of $3,000 to have a PC capable of playing new AAA games, but that just isn’t true, unless you desperately need every game to run on ultra.
1 Confusing Settings
Console gaming and PC gaming have been heading towards a middle ground for years. Consoles now require you to set up HDR and choose a performance setting on first launch the majority of the time, and PC games have simple settings to swap between, like medium and high graphics, while still offering far more granular options for those who want them. I spend basically the same amount of time tweaking settings on console games when I first launch them as I do with PC games. The main difference is that I have more control of individual options on PC, which can be great when a game runs almost perfectly, and you just need to knock down the shadows or something to get a stable frame rate. On consoles, if I’m not happy with the performance options presented to me, I’m just stuck with them, which can be frustrating, even if I would rather spend any time spent in a settings menu playing the game instead.
PC gaming has never been easier to get into
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s never been easier to get into PC gaming. It’s incredibly simple, especially if you don’t build your own rig, and you get benefits from the platform, like Steam sales having deeper discounts than console stores and not needing to pay a monthly fee to play multiplayer games. While I certainly have had some issues with my PC and bugs, it’s been much smoother than expected, and most issues have been easily solved.
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