It’s Nice Being Able To Play Console Exclusives On A PC

I was playing Forza Horizon 4 on my PC earlier this week and at one point after a race I put the controller down and just…smiled. Everything about what I was doing in that moment was lovely. Partly because of the game, which is great, but also just because of the fact I was able to be playing at all.

As someone who predominantly plays on PC and prefers playing on PC, I’ve long appreciated and even relied on home computer ports of big console games, whether doing this job or [gasp] just playing games for me. So I’m not talking about those. We’ve all been playing Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed on PC for the longest time.

But this thing where console-exclusive games, those previously the domain of a single jealously-protected platform, slide casually over to the PC like it’s no big deal is new (or relatively new, at least), and I am all for it. The deeply PlayStation Horizon Zero Dawn, on PC? Sure, why not! Death Stranding? Yes, please!

I’ve had particular fun in the last 12 months playing former Xbox exclusives, since I’d been out of the Xbox game for a while. I’d missed Gears 5, and ended up having the most fun with the series since maybe Gears 2, and now Forza in 4K at my desk is all kinds of fantastic as well.

I know this isn’t news, we’ve been doing this for a few years now, and even I’ve been writing about it on this very website as a thing that we report on. It just hit me this week, on a very general level, how good it is. How for all that is going wrong with the world, and even wrong with video games, here was something changing for the better.

The barbed-wire fences keeping good games from other systems has been a pain in the ass since the earliest days of this medium, and if you have any kind of support or logic for this, you are a brand-addled maniac. Video games are good, good video games are even better, and the more of them we can play on more platforms, the better!

These PC releases are doing that good work. My PS4 is practically unplayable because of the level of noise it makes (yes I’ve tried to fix it, no, it didn’t work) and my Xbox One is long gone, but so long as I can play some of their games on my PC, things are going OK!