It's easy to look at Voodoo PC, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, or even HP's new Blackbird and think that gaming PCs cost thousands of dollars. I mean, you can't get a PC that plays games well for under three grand, right? Not even close. Remember that Get Your Girlfriend To Build Her Own PC thing we did? That total system upgrade project cost under $1,500, and it plays games great. A couple times a year, we feature an $800 Budget Gaming PC in the Build-It section of the site. You can't crank up the settings on every new game on these boxes, only most of them.

But say you don't want to build your own PC. We understand—it can be intimidating. I went to Dell's website today and configured an Inspiron 530 with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, Vista Home Premium, 2 gigs of DDR2 800 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and DVD burner for $1050. That's with integrated graphics because the graphics options offered aren't too great. You gotta tack on $300 to buy a 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS from anywhere else on the web, which you can install yourself quite easily (no, really. It's not like "building your computer." Your mom can do it.). Oh, and that's with a 22" widescreen monitor.

That machine will play literally every modern PC game at its super-duper-pretty settings at 1680x1050 (take that, 720p console games!) for less than $1,500. You can do the same thing with computers from HP, or Gateway, or whatever your mass-market PC vendor of choice is. Just buy a system with a medium-grade processor, 2 gigs of fast RAM, and choose the cheapest graphics option they offer because you'll replace it with something good. Hell, even a 20" iMac with one gig of memory and a graphics card not half as fast will cost you $1,500, and people seem to pine over those.

Of course, $1,500 isn't chump change. It's far more expensive than a $300 console system. But of course, you do a lot more with it, right? You're probably reading this on a PC. It's where you watch all those game videos and read those gaming sites and blogs. It's where you get your email, download music, sync up your iPod, subscribe to podcasts, IM your friends, and all that good stuff.

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After the cost of entry, PC gaming is actually a better deal than consoles. For starters, top-tier PC games cost $50, while console games have bumped up the price to $60. And while you can hardly ever find good deals on hot new console games, new PC games are discounted in many retail stores all the time. Just today, I saw the brand-spanking-new triple-A game World in Conflict is on sale at Frys for $40. Older games are available on digital download services and in stores for often $20 or $30. Digital download systems abound. In fact, the best deal in gaming anywhere is the PC-only GameTap. For $10 a month, you can play almost 1,000 full games (and the list grows rapidly), including pixel-perfect emulated retro arcade games, console games, and PC games—many a year or two old and some even very new.

Let me give one specific example. Valve's The Orange Box is coming to Xbox 360 simultaneous with its PC launch, and to PS3 shortly after. It's $60 for the 360 and $50 for the PC, and both have $5 off pre-order deals. If you preorder on the 360, you get it when it comes out. If you preorder on the PC through Steam, you get access to Team Fortress 2 right now, and of course you can pre-load the games before release and just download the last little stub right away when it's released so you can play it immediately. Which is the better deal? Don't ask me, I'm too busy having a blast playing Team Fortress 2.

Consoles are just getting into the whole free demo download thing, but the PC is king of that realm. You could spend hours a day doing little else other than playing the dozens, even hundreds of PC demos that are released each year. Not to mention the astounding number of free games out there for the PC. On the consoles, almost nothing is ever free.

Oh, and next time you get nickel-and-dimed for every little content download for a game you paid $60 for, sometimes even charging you for what amounts to a cheat code, ask yourself if that inexpensive console is really saving your more money than the guy on his PC downloading oodles of free user-generated content, often of equal or better quality, and playing online for free. Continued...

Myth #2: PC gaming means nothing but broken releases, updates, and patches

It's true that the greatest strength of the PC, its breadth of hardware and rapid pace of improvement, is also its worst enemy. Game makers have to test their PC games against loads of configurations, instead of just the one console. That, combined with the lack of certification process by a console manufacturer, means that some PC games release with bugs and need to be patched. Okay, virtually every game gets a patch.

That's not nearly as dire as it sounds. Internet forums and blogs act like an echo chamber, magnifying the apparent problem rate to ridiculous proportions. The vast majority of customers simply play the game, and never encounter any bugs or serious technical problems. On a console, if one person encounters a bug, it probably exists for everyone—because the hardware's all the same. Because of the infinite combination of hardware and software on PCs, the same is not true. So when you read about a bug in a PC game, that doesn't necessarily mean you're likely to encounter it.

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And hey, lets not look at all patches like it's a bad thing. Don't like 2K Games' decision about how widescreen was handled in BioShock? If you're on an Xbox 360, that's just too bad. The open-access nature of PCs means that a user-created widescreen hack to fix the issue was available within a day. Continued...

Myth #3: PC games don't sell, and are falling far behind console game sales

Sales tracking firm NPD said there were "over $970 million" in PC game sales, and $7.4 billion in total game sales. So, roughly a billion in sales for the PC, and $6.4 billion for consoles. Consoles are slaughtering PCs, right? Actually, it's not that simple.

First of all, it's a stacked deck. The PC is one platform, the Xbox 360 is one platform, the PlayStation 3 is one platform, the Nintendo DS is one platform, etc. If you make a game for the PS3, it doesn't magically run on the 360 any more than it magically runs on the PC. PC game sales as tracked by NPD are being beat over 6:1 by the combination of all console platforms. Of course it is! NPD did not provide a breakdown by platform (except for the PC), though. Divvy up that $6.4 billion in console sales into its respective separate platforms: Xbox, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP. There are at least nine major "console" platforms, each as incomparable to each other as the PC is to consoles, contributing to that $6.4 billion in sales. If the distribution were even (and it's not), you'd have about $711 million per console platform. Now, the PC is leading! Of course, consoles like the PS2, Nintendo DS, and Xbox 360 had the lion's share of game sales, while newer and more expensive systems like the PS3 with a more limited software lineup had less. It's safe to assume, in the absence of specific console-by-console data, that PC game sales fell somewhere in the middle of the pack—behind the top few console systems, and ahead of several others. You could certainly characterize the PC as selling games at retail "just as well" as "the average console system."

If, by NPD's own data, the PC is selling games at retail as well as your "typical" console system, why spell out the doom and gloom message? Is every console that doesn't sit in the top 2 or 3 spots for software sales "doomed" and "failing?" Is it only worthwhile to make games for the Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, and PS2, because that's where all the game sales are? Of course not, and the same is true for the PC.

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But there's even more to it than that. First of all, NPD only tracks retail sales, and only in the U.S.. Yes, the U.S. has the strongest retail games market, but PC games are very popular worldwide. Especially in Europe, and Germany in particular, PC game sales top sales charts. Most importantly, the PC is well ahead of consoles in online game sales—which NPD does not track. Whether it's GameTap, Steam, Direct2Drive, TotalGaming.net, or even the direct download store at the EBgames site, buying games exclusively online is huge on PCs. And that doesn't even include things like recurring payments or digital item sales for online games like World of Warcraft. Research firm Strategy Analytics said that the global online games market generated over $3.8 billion in revenue in 2006, and is growing at over 25% per year. Yes, some of that is buying downloadable content on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, or Wii Virtual Console, but the money pulled in by those are a drop in the bucket, globally, to the online revenue generated by PC game sales.

Unfortunately, nobody is yet providing the kind of apples-to-apples data that lets us get a true picture of PC game sales. Take that "over $970 million" sales of PC games from NPD. That's just retail and just the U.S. Nobody is tracking online game sales for just the U.S. in a reasonably comprehensive way. Or if they are, they're not proving data, breaking it down by platform and by game sales & addons vs. recurring subscription fees. I don't think it's a stretch to say that several hundred million dollars worth of games & addons have happened online in the U.S.

All of a sudden, PC game sales don't look too shoddy. And they're especially attractive when you consider that third-party publishers don't have to fork over $7-10 per sale in royalties to a console developer.

So are the consoles grossly outselling PC games? Yes, in aggregate, but it's hardly fair or rational to compare multiple platforms against one. Viewed against any other single platform, PC game sales are quite good. Do the industry tracking firms show sharper growth among console game sales than PC game sales? Again yes, but this is a factor of PC game sales increasingly moving online, and thus not being tracked. Continued...

Myth #4: Online gaming on the PC is a mess, and no match for the likes of Xbox Live

Everybody love Xbox Live, and the way it gives you a nice unified friend list, voice chat, cross-game invites, and so on. You can access all that stuff right away within any game, and send or receive messages and voice with your friends who are playing other things, or nothing at all. And the PlayStation 3's online experience is catching up, through a series of never-ending large firmware updates (see Myth #2). The PC world has nothing like that, right?

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Here, I'll just bring up two examples: Xfire and Steam. Both are free. Both give you a unified friends list, and the ability to just click and join your friend's game. You can access your friends list and message your buddies from within games. Both offer free voice chat (and by the way, it's of noticeably higher quality than Xbox Live's). In fact, both of these services offer something neither Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network do—the ability to form groups or "clans". Xfire even has a built-in patch and mod peer-to-peer downloading function built in, and of course Steam will keep up to date any game offered through the Steam service (you can easily add other games to your Steam list and see your friends playing them and so on, it just won't auto-update). Both are simple, fast, and easy to use.

So, does the PC have anything like Xbox Live or PlayStation Network? No, it has at least two such things, that are better. Oh, and to play anything at all online on your Xbox 360, you have to pony up $50 a year for a "Gold" Xbox Live account. Online on the PC, with the obvious exception of MMOs like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, is almost always free.

Of course, awesome software like Xfire and the new Steam Community stuff only makes the paltry Games for Windows Live offering look worse by comparison. But that's Microsoft's failing, not a failing of the PC as a game platform. Continued...

Myth #5: Copy protection on PC games is a major headache

Okay, I'll kind of give you this one. Some PC games have some pretty annoying copy protection schemes that make it difficult to take your legit, store-bought PC game and play it on whatever computer you want to. You can easily take that store-bought PS3 or Wii or whatever game and pop it into any other PS3/Wii/whatever. But the consoles are becoming no stranger to what the crowds are calling DRM headaches (though DRM is pretty ubiquitous on even older console and PC games, and DVDs, and many other things when you think about it).

Want to play your Xbox 360 game on a different console but use your profile so you can earn achievements on it? You'll have to "recover" your gamertag on that other console first, which means sitting there and watching a progress bar for 15 minutes or more. Or you can put it on a memory card, but that costs extra money. If you buy an Xbox Live Arcade game, it's tied to your gamertag and the specific console you bought it on. So even when you're not online, other profiles on that console can play it. But if your 360 ever breaks or you for any reason play on another one, your game is still tied to that original box. Now nobody else can play it, and you have to be logged into Live to play it yourself.

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Most games from the Playstation Store on the PS3 work the same way. Except when they don't. Perhaps the most coveted game on Sony's digital distribution system is Warhawk. It also happens to be the most expensive game there, at $40. It is tied only to the Playstation ID that bought it. Others on the same console can't play it.

There are some advantages to the mish-mash of PC copy protection schemes out there. Buy a game through a digital distribution system like Steam or Totalgaming.net, and you can log in with your ID to any computer you want, download it, and play it. Some games require you to type in a CD key and then don't need the disc in the drive ever again, something multi-user households that are constantly swapping discs out of their console can probably appreciate. (And of course, there are "no CD" cracks and "virtual drives" for just about every other PC game that will let you do the same even if the game normally requires there to be a disc in the drive.)

So yeah, PC copy protections can be a bigger annoyance than the console "just pop in the disc and don't worry about it" model, as evidenced by BioShock's PC activation nonsense. And other times, it can be even than that box in your living room—it's "pop in the disc to install and never worry about the disc again." Taken together with the DRM shenanigans of the console games from the new console digital distribution systems, and you could call it a wash. Continued...

Don't Miss Out

No matter what you read on your favorite gaming website or forum, PC games don't play second-fiddle to consoles. The games aren't selling worse than console games when you look at the big picture. The copy protection stuff isn't really that bad—the bad cases are the only ones that people talk about. PCs have online gaming communities that rival anything found on consoles. PCs aren't nearly as unreliable as you may have been led to believe. Besides, how many people have dealt with Xbox 360s due to the infamous "red rings of death?" I had to return my Nintendo Wii within weeks of buying it, because the video chip died. Garnett Lee over at 1Up had a faulty PS3. The consoles are pretty reliable relative to PCs, but it's not as lopsided as the world would have you think.

Read an older article in the same vein: Ten Gaming Myths Debunked.

I'm not arguing in "favor" of the PC as a gaming platform. Like I said before, I have all the major consoles and portables. I play most of the hot console games, quite a lot. I'm a fan. But after seven or eight years as a professional game journalist and now four years as a more general PC and tech enthusiast journalist, I know that great games are where you find them. If you're not gaming on your PC, you're missing out on a lot of great games, and sometimes playing inferior versions of the same games. If you haven't played Company of Heroes, you missed out on one of the best games of the last couple years, on any platform, period. If you're thinking, "but I don't like real-time strategy games," then you can get in line behind the half-dozen friends that said the same thing to me, until they played it, and couldn't tear themselves away.