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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the vast majority of FPS players are using controllers...

Most highly skilled FPS players are using mice/keyboard. In games where both console and PC are supported, PC players usually have far higher mechanical skills due to the greater controllability enabled by mouse/keyboard. Watch the OWL, and half the maneuvers that players make are simply impossible to do with a game controller.

Wouldn't a keyboard be considered a mechanical interface still since you have mechanical springs, switches that convert into a digital signal which is what is used for most games.

What's your point? Anyone who's played video games is well aware that value of both in different contexts. Which is my point about it not being a panacea...

It's not about the value of mice/keyboards vs controllers in gaming but about designing the best interfaces for the use-case. I doubt when the Navy designs their systems that they're trying to mimic professional gamers who needs 99.9% aiming accuracy and extremely fast response times in a simulated environment. Typically you design it for the average person, with the least amount of complexity.

My point was rebutting the nonsense you wrote about most FPS players using controllers.

[Citation needed]

Call of duty and rainbow six and countless other FPS games sell big on console. Google says games sales are 35% PC.

Which again has nothing to do what I said. Stop turning this into a petty flames war.

I have provided one citation from a Forbes article on this thread already, but it really depends on which measurements you pick.

If by console player numbers vs PC player numbers, we are talking about the number of people who have ever played an FPS shooter on either platform, console is almost certainly smaller, purely due to the ubiquity of the PC.

Most regular game players of either preference have played on both at one point or another. But the sheer quantity of people alive who have played the shareware first levels of FPS shooters on PCs at one point or another, and who if they have ever used a console, will have played pastel coloured puzzle games, or used health gadgets with plastic exercise equipment straight out of Brave New World, tips the scale massively.

That being said, I would not be particularly surprised if the number of people currently playing an FPS shooter on either platform, as of this instant, was greater for console.

Cool. I'm sure anyone who's played FPS serious knows keyboards are superior. I played Rainbow Six at the top tier on both platforms and I remember the e-sports still uses controllers for FPS games. It's quite amazing what they can do with it given the limitations of joysticks.

Drones are being piloted with Joysticks as are underwater submarines and other technology. Use-cases where high percussion mouse movements and the millisecond differences between mechanical keyboards and a gamepad button are of no value as they are mechanically limited machines - not simulations.

I use a keyboard/mouse for PC games not because I'm trying to be an elite couter-strike player, I just find the analog joystick uncomfortable and difficult to use most of the time.

Similarly, coming from CS:GO, I'm way better at Hitman 2 with mouse & keyboard than I am with a controller, even though it has great optimizations for controllers.

It's an analogy. I'm not saying they should specifically be using game controllers to navigate ships.

I would be surprised if that was true for PC games. Keyboard and mouse is vastly superior to any gamepad. Steering wheel and yoke beat keyboard and mouse for simulations, but that's a very specific use case.

I suspect there are more PC gamers than console gamers and FPS shooters will lean towards PC compared to the overall distribution.

>I suspect there are more PC gamers than console gamers

Source for this? Random search yields this:

>Steam now has more than 65 million active accounts. [...] Microsoft's Xbox Live has 48 million accounts [...] and Sony's PlayStation Network claims 110 million.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/30/5045830/steam-65-million...

Here's one -

>"After reading the interview, I went back to my own conversation with Raptr CEO Dennis Fong, who reminded me there are a staggering 900 million PC gamers worldwide. Contrast that data with global consoles sales of, say, Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Sony's PlayStation 3: About 262 million units. Combined. Granted, that's according to VGChartz which isn't a perfectly reliable snapshot, but even with a considerable error rate that tells a compelling story. The most popular game console to date is the PlayStation, with estimated global sales of 157 million."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/04/28/as-gl...

It says Steam has 75 million users while bulk of the rest of active games are all MMO games like Roblox which has 100 million and League of Legends at 70M by itself.

https://www.wepc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/worldwide-di...

https://www.wepc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/worldwide-un...

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