It would be very difficult to argue that the reasons to get a console instead of a gaming PC have not been lowering steadily over the years. Basically the entire PC gaming community has all gave into a single provider of games that makes buying and playing PC games more convenient than ever. Games that probably would have been full console exclusives only a generation ago like Death Stranding or literally every game published by Microsoft have started to come to PC. PC players also continue to play games online for free while every console maker has now begun asking players to pay them to be able to play most games online. Probably most of all PC hardware has been severely outpacing gaming consoles in terms of power for a long time now. Still, many reasons to play on console remain as of early 2020, at least.
Physical Games
One of the few distinguishing factors between a PC and console at this point is physical games. While PC games do often have physical versions, they are available for far fewer games than on consoles and don’t have any set standards like physical console games do. For anyone who likes owning their games physically consoles clearly provide a significantly better experience than PCs in this respect. Physical games also allow console player to share their games easily and even sell them to other gamers or stores like GameStop to have more money to put towards other games. Obviously nobody is going to buy a used game for more than a new game so used games are a useful way for console players to get cheap games that PC players pretty much don’t have access to.
Exclusives
One of the biggest reasons to buy any given console over another console also applies as a reason to buy consoles in general over PCs. Although this isn’t true for most Xbox games at this point, games like Persona 5 and Super Mario Odyssey certainly won’t be seeing a release on PC anytime soon.
Consoles as a whole also often have exclusives among them that only don’t release on PC. Games like the NHL series and Kingdom Hearts 3 for example will only be available on consoles for the foreseeable future. For consoles that have backwards compatibility, this means that those consoles have access to a long history of games that never got PC ports that are playable only on those consoles. Although PC players have the morally and legally controversial option of emulation, console makers will almost always be able to provide a better experience than these emulators and also have the funding to provide them much more quickly.
Features
Although PCs can be much more powerful than consoles at this point, consoles often have other features or play games that a PC can’t without some sort of hacking that would pretty much involve buying the console in the first place. Probably the most common of these features are CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and now 4K Blu-ray disc drives that have stayed in consoles as they have left pretty much all PCs. PC players can buy drives of their own of these types but they would cost a large fraction of how much an entire console would cost and thats not even taking into account getting the software on the PC to use that drive.
Especially with Nintendo consoles, consoles often provide an experience that has no reasonably equal PC alternative in terms of quality. For example, if you want to play motion control games, a console like the Wii or a Kinect for your Xbox 360 will get you an experience that you can’t get on PC without using that hardware. Even more drastic is the difference between a handheld and a PC. There is no portable PC gaming of nearly the same quality and nearly as convenient as Nintendo Switch and there won’t be anytime soon.
Size and Power Use
Possibly the only difference between consoles and PCs that has stayed constant is the differences in size and power use. PC towers are generally around twice as big as the biggest consoles ever made, and enormous compared to consoles like the Wii. This is obviously an inconvenience, especially in some cultures where people live in much smaller spaces.
Power draw is a similarly big difference. While an entire PS4 uses no more than 200W at any given time, a GTX 1080 uses close to 200W on its own. This negatively effects both your electric bill and the environment as that power has to come from somewhere.
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This is not an exhaustive list of all the advantages of owning consoles rather than PCs, but it does hit upon many of the major points. Something else that is important to remember is that PCs and consoles can exist together. There is no need for one to die in favor of another, and if that ever happens it will probably be an extension of the slow progress consoles and PCs are already making towards being like each other rather than some immediate change. If anything its more likely some other more convenient form of gaming like cloud gaming or mobile gaming will take over before then.
