I defected to the PS5 after 30 years of PC gaming — here's why I have no regrets about swapping the RAM crisis for the disc crisis

I've been an avid PC gamer since the early 1990s. My first computer, bought specifically to play Star Wars: X-Wing, was a plucky 486DX running at 33MHz (cutting-edge at the time — well, only behind the 486DX2, but that was too pricey). I have fond memories of playing Doom on the office LAN and getting addicted to Quake when online gaming began (thanks to QuakeWorld, which made dial-up modem play viable as opposed to an utter lag-fest).

I could ramble on with nostalgic gaming recollections, but the point is I played Quake obsessively — to a high competitive level in a clan — then I lived and breathed EverQuest for several years, and down the line, I was totally lost in World of Warcraft for another few years, and so on.

I've always been a PC gamer, through and through — I did swear off MMORPGs, mind, as I can't be trusted not to lose large chunks of my life to them. From time-to-time, I've owned a console too, but it's always been by backup, second-string gaming machine, used sparingly.

Not anymore, though. My PC is now used just for work, and I haven't played a game on it for a year or so.

I am now, officially, a PS5 gamer. A console is my main gaming machine for the first time in my life. So, how did that happen?

A vow revoked and a lesson learned

If you happen to have read my past articles, you may recall that at the end of 2024, I vowed I wasn't going to buy a PS5 Pro last year. My masterplan was to avoid purchasing a new console, and use my gaming PC on the main TV in the living room for couch co-op sessions with my wife instead, while still being able to game in the study with my computer if I wanted.

Then came Black Friday in November of 2025, and I did a complete 180. I pulled the trigger on a good deal on a PS5 Pro bundle.

What changed during the course of 2025? Firstly, I realized that running cables from a PC in the study through to the living room TV is more of a hassle than I'd anticipated. Getting everything set up at the end of each week, ahead of my weekend gaming sessions, quickly became tiresome.

Moreover, I found my long HDMI cable wasn't reliable enough. The picture on my Sony OLED TV kept flickering, which was maddening, frankly. And for no apparent reason, too — sometimes it'd happen, sometimes it wouldn't. I never found out why. I also had occasional issues with my game controllers (typical PC hardware gremlins that were perfectly resolvable, but still a pain).

On top of that, having held off on buying a GPU upgrade for my PC — my plan for the money I would've spent on a PS5 (and did eventually spend on the console) — I was put off by issues around the RTX 5070 when it arrived. This was the graphics card I really had my eye on, but it was a disappointing incarnation in terms of its performance upgrade (and that 12GB of VRAM). The initial above-MSRP price only rubbed salt into these wounds.

The prices of AMD's rival GPUs were off-putting, too, in the early days of RDNA 4 — although that did change, and I came close to buying an RX 9070 XT when pricing finally settled down.

However, at that point, it was too late. I was already frustrated with my whole piping-the-PC-from-the-study situation, and by the time that Black Friday PS5 Pro bundle bargain popped up (it really was a great deal), I just couldn't resist.

I absolutely don't regret that decision, nor am I upset about buying a console with the money that was earmarked for upgrading my ailing RTX 2060 Super. That's not to say I don't miss some things about PC gaming, or that I'm not super-annoyed about Sony's latest stunt regarding discs.

I'm going to cover both sides of this gaming coin here. First, I'll tell you why I'm loving my time with the PS5 Pro now, before discussing what I don't like on the Sony side of the fence, and the clear, undeniable strengths of PC gaming.

PlayStation bliss

I did own a PS4 Pro before — as my second-string gaming device, backing up my PC — and it's striking just how much slicker the PS5 Pro is. For one thing, I found my PS4 Pro to be the noisiest console I've ever had, by far. It was noisier than any PC I've owned, and some vacuum cleaners for that matter.

The PS5 Pro is nicely quiet, super-fast to boot up, and more importantly to wake and sleep. This means it's dead easy to fire up the console for a very quick gaming session if I only have 10 minutes to spare and just want to dip into something briefly, or to pause a session (put the console in rest mode) if I need to pop out. It all feels very seamless, and there's not a snaking USB extension cable or HDMI lead in sight.

Visually, everything looks top-notch on my 4K OLED TV, too. Baldur's Gate 3 — yes, I was very late to the RPG — looked nothing short of fantastic, and the PS5 allowed me to play the adventure co-op with my wife in what was the best co-operative gaming experience I've ever had. Being able to dip in and out so easily, as we cooked dinner, then ate, then fed the dog, going back and forth to the living room in-between, was a major boon.

The PS5 has reminded me just how good couch co-op can be, and I've been enjoying indie games like Dysmantle, which has same-screen co-op (like Baldur's Gate 3). We've been playing a bunch of these games — it's the Diablo 4 expansions next, if you're curious (we played the base game on PS4, so I'm keen to see how good the game looks on its successor console).

The PS5 controllers were an unexpected bonus, too. They're so much better than the PS4, and they even fit my wife's smaller hands (she finds many controllers too big and painfully cumbersome, but not the DualSense).

Of course, a clear benefit of the PS5 over the PC is that there's no messing about with GPU drivers. By which I mainly mean poring through Reddit 'megathreads' worrying about whether the latest Game Ready installment is actually going to be a step backwards for my PC, perhaps in terms of performance for a particular game or bugs (or broken features). Windows 11 bugs are another issue, too. (Yes, there can be software glitches on the PlayStation, but nothing like what some PC gamers must endure at times.)

Then there's the RAM crisis. Buying PC components is just getting more and more painful. Obviously RAM and SSD prices are through the roof already, but PC gamers waiting on a GPU upgrade (as I was) are facing unpleasant hikes due to the price of video memory (VRAM). Indeed, the latest rumor from YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed is potential price hikes to the tune of 40% in some cases with Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Add plenty of seasoning with that assertion, of course, but it's clear enough that GPUs are getting pricier due to VRAM increases, especially for graphics cards loaded up with more of this memory (naturally). CPUs are in line to get more expensive, too.

The crisis in general is predicted to intensify as this year rolls on, and 2027 could be worse still — perhaps the worst ever year for the memory industry, alarmingly. With no need to upgrade my desktop, I'm glad to be out of this gloomy environment of spiraling costs. The situation has turned planning PC upgrade paths, which used to be a rather fun, sometimes even exciting, exercise, into a thoroughly depressing experience.

You might now be shouting at your screen about Sony hiking PlayStation prices, too, and that's a fair point. But I won't have to worry about upgrading my console, and it will happily sit in my living room for the next few years, blissfully not needing any new components (while my work PC can carry on happily with its RTX 2060 Super).

Granted, that's just my personal situation, and if you are thinking about buying a Sony console, with the new price of the PS5 Pro, I don't know if I'd recommend pushing for it over the vanilla PS5 now. (I got mine on sale for about 60% of the current lowest retail price). The base PS5 is still a great console, though, and it'll likely make a lot more sense for the average gamer — especially come Black Friday, when with any luck, there'll be some good deals around once again.

PC strong suits

There are a good number of plus points for PC gaming versus consoles, so as promised, I'll examine the other side of the equation here, and pick out what I particularly miss.

There are some notable downsides with console gaming, including that you need to pay for a subscription to access online multiplayer (in the main, although obviously that doesn't include free games like Fortnite). This doesn't bother me personally because I don't really play online anymore — as I said early, it's mostly about local co-op for me these days. But I totally get why having to pay for a monthly plan irks gamers who want to play the latest shooter, strategy epic, or whatever else, online.

What does bother me, though, is the price of the actual games on the PlayStation. One of the major strengths of the PC is that games are cheaper than they are on console, from big-name releases (which still command a weighty premium... just not as hefty as on consoles) through to a raft of indie titles, which are often very competitively priced.

Not only this, but you get regular Steam sales where some games get huge discounts (and you can pick up older titles in particular for a song), or value-crammed GOG bundles, and also the likes of Epic giving away some compelling offerings for free. You don't get any of this on the PlayStation, and Sony's store does seem to like to charge a lot, even for older titles. For me, this is probably the biggest drawback with shifting over to being a PS5 gamer.

A recent development compounded the situation, too, when we learned that Sony is doing away with physical discs for the PlayStation. I was already aware of the situation with the price of PlayStation games, of course, which is why when I bought my PS5, I chose a bundle with a disc drive.

That meant I could pick up, for example, the physical disc copy of Split Fiction for 40% less than the digital copy on the PlayStation Store. I can also currently purchase second-hand, older games on disc at a considerable saving. But all these possibilities are heading rapidly out the window when 2028 rolls around, and Sony enacts its plan to push physical media completely aside with the PlayStation.

I won't go into this controversy in depth here – we've covered it extensively elsewhere — but suffice it to say that I'm not happy about the idea at all, and it feels like a cynical and generally anti-consumer practice. And no matter how many gamers sign petitions (here have been a lot) it doesn't seem like Sony is going to backtrack on this one (aside from maybe niche collector's editions or the like, and if we're lucky enough to get those, they will of course cost a fortune).

You could argue that the PC is digital-only already: desktops don't come with disc drives anymore, those days are long gone. But what Sony is doing is quite different, given that PC gaming is an open platform bristling with different stores and options for digital purchases, whereas Sony has the PlayStation ecosystem locked down to its store. With physical media banished, a key choice and avenue for money-saving (don't forget, you can also recoup money by selling on your disc copy of a game) is removed, and Sony has an unhealthy level of control over the whole shooting match.

Okay, so I don't feel like the PlayStation disc drive I bought is useless — it'll be good for a long while yet, and I'll still be able to play older games on it, including my PS4 back catalog, plus I can use it for Blu-rays. Regardless, this Sony decision is a painful kick in the shin.

Finally, another obvious plus point for PC gaming is the variety of mods floating around and customization possibilities in general, which you don't get with a console. The PC is quite simply a more open platform all-round — although in my case, modding isn't something that I'm all that into anyway.

Disc-less Elysium

Let me finish by pointing out the obvious: a lot of this is very subjective. You may have quite different opinions. You might live and breathe mods. You might want games to look out-of-this-world, with visual options cranked to the max (and be able to afford the necessary PC hardware to achieve that). You may never want to play a shooter without a mouse and keyboard (I get that one, but I'm okay with a controller now — and I don't play competitively anymore).

You may never, ever, abandon your gaming PC. They may have to extract it from your cold, hardened claws after rigor mortis has set in, having expired clutching the object you love most in the world, in the hopes somehow taking it with you into the afterlife.

The point is, there are all sorts of pros and cons to be tailored for your own personal take on the gaming PC versus console debate. But for me, I'm really happy with my PS5 and I am looking forward to enjoying my living room, and co-op, gaming experiences for years to come... discs or no discs.