Disparity between console and PC players
Back in the late 80s, Nintendo was already pretty far into dominating the entire video games industry. They succeeded in a field that everyone else thought was dead upon the release of the Famicom/NES. Other companies decided they could really grab some of the market if they released something unique enough. Enter Sega.
Sega had a very under-played 8-bit console called the Master System. Not many people owned it, and it wasn’t well known. They needed something bigger, and they needed advertising to get the word out. They released the Sega Genesis as a result, the first major 16-bit dedicated gaming console.
At the time, PC gaming lived only within a few genres. Side-scrolling seemed quite hard to do, so ports of popular NES games were usually inferior. However, id Software was hard at work on a revolutionary game — Wolfenstein. Their code guy, John Carmack, found out a way to simulate 3-D motion on a 2-D game, and the first-person shooter was (with the exception of Battle Zone back in the Atari days) born.
Back to consoles: The late 80s became a battleground for Nintendo vs. Sega. Nintendo wasn’t ready to release a new console yet — they poured years of R&D into the portable Game Boy. Sega began aggressively advertising for their new console, the Genesis, in the US, with their new team focusing on the power of the hardware. “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” was the catch phrase.
So, what does this have to do with your question? Well, this advertising battle started the first major “console war.” When the SNES was finally released, Nintendo had an uphill battle when it came to advertising, and parents of kids who wanted these systems would usually insist on only purchasing one. The cost of a console was excessive to a lot of people, so why would a kid need two game players at the same time, right? This resulted in kids on the playground arguing over which system (the one they owned) was better. Mortal Kombat has blood on the Genesis, Street Fighter’s way better on the SNES, and so on. These were heated arguments! Punches were thrown!
Console wars kept happening, culminating in the first internet-enabled war, the PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360. It was brutal, if you remember that one. Microsoft had managed to release a console with a similar structure to a PC, so developers suddenly had a really easy way to bring a quality console game over to the PC. The PC was doing well, especially thanks to Valve, not just because of Steam but also due to the ground-breaking Half-Life series that revolutionized the keyboard-and-mouse first-person shooter, which then led to Counter-Strike becoming a gigantic online shooter franchise.
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Once controller support was ironed out and standardized, and games on PC became so similar to their console counterparts, PC gaming became not just a place for keyboard/mouse shooters or strategy games, it became a place for all games. At this point — late in the PS3/360 cycle — it was possible for you to just have a PC and play most of the good multi-platform releases.
Of course, PC gaming is expensive and, at first, Byzantine when it comes to selecting parts and building a system. You’ll pour quite a budget into building a PC, and you may not wind up with a console as a result. You may get a console due to the ease-of-use and how well it works with a TV. Valve, in the meantime, continues to try to make the PC viable in a couch/TV world, but desks and gaming chairs became the PC gaming norm.
This generation of consoles so far isn’t necessarily fostering a console war. PS4 is way out front, to the point where an entirely new type of Xbox is on its way in 2017. Console architecture is very similar to PC architecture now in order to entice third-parties to release their games on the systems. So, what can we fight over? Well, we can fight over PS4 versus the other game platform with a large install base — the PC. So, what used to be a schoolyard showdown over which console a kid’s parents would buy is now a showdown between “You can’t throw a 1080ti card in a closed-off PS4” and “We have Bloodborne and you don’t.” Controller versus keyboard/mouse on shooters, as mentioned in a ton of answers here, is also an important part of this, and now people *learn* one scheme or the other.
Basically, it’s the same old song and dance, still the old days of Genesis versus Super Nintendo. People are defending the thing they own, and putting down the others as a result in order to internally justify the cash they (or their parents) put down. Merge all gaming consoles with a PC in the future and it’ll be mobile versus home gaming soon enough. As VR develops, we might have visors to brawl over, too.
As they say in Fallout, a PC-only game that suddenly became a console hit with Fallout 3, “War… war never changes.”
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