It's near impossible to bring up specific games, as it varies depending on your setup.
To a certain extent, but there are games that are universally bad ports. Arkham Knight doesn't run well on anyone's PC.
Likewise, if you're looking for a stable gaming setup you can build for that. Buy NVidia. Buy Intel. Don't do silly things with overclocking.
Add to that the entirely unnecessary systems like Uplay, Battlenet and Origin, that offer no benefits to consumers, but instead adds another thing that can, and does for some, go wrong. Steam falls in under this category as well, in the sense that it's borderline mandatory on PC, but at least it has eventually become a stable service with a massive library of games.
Someone has to provide the online store. Saying Steam is mandatory is like saying the PSN store or Xbox store is mandatory. Of course they are. Games don't just magically appear on your machine.
On PC you at least have other options if you want, but I wouldn't recommend any of them (except maybe GoG) if you're trying to go the plug and play route. But they exist.
Then we have the abundance of cheaters online, something you're not likely to ever encounter on console outside of people abusing glitches.
Come on, man. Let's at least be serious. Xbox 360 had cheaters by the truckload, and so did PS3 after it was broken.
The only reason that cheaters on console are rare so far is that X1 and PS4 haven't been broken. So far. There are some cheats for certain games, but that's as far as it goes. It's certainly good.
But not all PC games have problems with cheaters (because anti-cheat exists), and not all games even have significant online components. If you play shooters, yeah, maybe you're better on console for that reason. But that's not a strike against the ability to plug and play on PC. That's just the nature of the hardware and the lengths to which developers are willing to go to protect their online experiences.
And last, but not least, we have the PC parts themselves, and in my experience, their tendency to break down. I realise that consoles can of course break down too, some more so than others, but I've never had it happen to me. On the other hand, every part in my PC has broken down at some point, resulting in a expensive trip to the dealer. Upgrading my CPU, motherboard, RAM (to 8GB DDR5) and disc drives cost me twice that of my PS4 at release.
And as I've pointed out, this hasn't been my experience. I've replaced one power supply that I'm not entirely sure was dodgy, but I was chasing a weird problem that wouldn't go away. Upgrading the power supply allowed me to move to a bigger GPU anyway (before they started releasing upgrade cards that were more power efficient).
Let's not even get into the fact that if you're paying $800+ for CPU, MB, RAM and some disc drives you are by definition not the sort of casual player that I'm talking about. Someone who just wants their stuff to work doesn't spend that much, that's enthusiast level gear.
Unless you just have more money than you know what to do with, in which case I'd love some.
My entire computer cost about that much.
I've also had two PS3s go on me. But who cares? I know that in general they're pretty reliable, so I don't bring it up as evidence that they aren't. Ditto computer parts. Most of them will last 3+ years, probably at least 5. At which point they'll be worth about 20 bucks and you'll be wondering whether to sell them or just throw them in the bin.
That's not even including a GPU, one of the more significant parts in the rig. So yeah, I could add an additional 50% to the price of my GPU because there was no way of installing it myself.
Or you could find the one tech savvy friend that you undoubtedly have and buy them a case of beer. But realistically, you could just watch a video on youtube of how to install a GPU and realise that it's only slightly more complicated than plugging the console into the TV. Card goes click into the slot, and you plug in the cables that fit into the holes.
It's pretty much foolproof unless you're flinging the card around the room while wearing a woolly sweater and rubbing yourself with plastic bags. I reckon you'd have a way harder time setting up a VR headset than installing a graphics card, if you actually looked into what it entails. Attaching the Kinect to my X360 and getting it set up and calibrated was harder than installing my last graphics card, and the Kinect only has two cables.
Or like, buy DDR4 instead of DDR5. You won't notice the difference and use the money to pay for your install. It will take the teenager at the shop ten minutes, tops.
But their ar plenty of prohibitive factors as well, that are mostly not found on consoles.
Of course there are, but you can absolutely have a plug and play experience on PC. If you want to. I find that the people that complain about it being complicated are mostly making it complicated for themselves.
On the other hand, console does not allow for the kind of freedom and customisation that PC does and never will, by design.
"PS4-Poverty". You came up with that?
