Consoles have mainly operated following the razor and blades economic model: sell the console at or near cost and then sell the games at much higher prices than PC games.
Overall they were always an inferior financial choice vs the PC because that extra costs for console games didn’t take that many games to exceed the savings in upfront costs of buying a console over a PC - turns out that plenty of games which aren’t ultra-realistic extravaganzas with budgets in the 100s of millions of dollars are also fun because gameplay is more important than graphics, and there are tons of those for the PC and they’re way cheaper than the latest AAA fancy-graphics with meuh gameplay games that are console exclusives.
Worse, this was the before: nowadays a console itself isn’t really all that much cheaper than a PC, so even the upfront saving isn’t there anymore.
Unsurprisingly consoles have been losing ground to PCs.
Consoles honestly don’t even feel necessary at all anymore. It used to be that you got better performance compared to a similarly priced PC, but that’s not really the case anymore; console prices just keep going up, and the price of a decent gaming PC hasn’t really changed much in the last 15 years. Even things like the Switch are largely invalidated by hand-held PC gaming solutions. Maybe it’s just time the consoles die off.
Consoles bring convenience for gamers that don’t care to know much about tech. Not something of much value to me and you I bet but it’s still a surprisingly strong argument. Think of how many users refuse to try Linux no matter how much they hate Windows.
Anyways next time you build a decent mid-range gaming PC you’re in for a reality check regarding prices imho. I’ve built one last month and yikes! I had to chill on my RAM target let me tell you. Storage stung way more than it used to as well. And I ended up taking ye olde GPU for one more spin.
Yah prices haven’t changed, sure bud. Graphic cards have gotten insanely expensive and now RAM and storage is going up to. What a bunch of BS that the prices haven’t changed in 15 years.
I mean, excluding temporary price jumps that affect the entire industry like the current RAM and storage shortage… I assumed that was obviously implied.
Here’s the thing: you don’t need the newest, greatest graphics card. I’ve managed just fine for my entire life by never spending more than $800 or so on new PCs. (When I upgrade, I typically just replace everything and have a second PC, rather than replacing half of it and having spare parts). Do I have the best and latest? No, absolutely not, but I also said a “decent” gaming PC, not “the best PC money can buy”. Certainly comparable to - or better than - current gen consoles.
That’s exactly why they’ll come back as locked down cloud streaming boxes with AI spyware and exclusive releases.
If things keep going the way they are, consumers won’t be able to afford PCs. You’ll own nothing, and like it or else
Also last night my daughter and newborn were asleep, I turned on the playstation and… needs an update that will take 90 minutes.
The biggest thing about consoles was that they “just work” no driver bullshit or updates.
He, i couldn’t play on my PS4 at night because it sounded like a hair dryer at max power. Fully disassembling, cleaning and repasting will fix it for a couple of weeks, maybe three, then a jet engine again. My PC is dead quiet.
and the price of a decent gaming PC hasn’t really changed much in the last 15 years.
I take it you haven’t priced parts for a gaming PC in the last 15 years?
I know this may come as a shock to some people, but you do not have to buy the latest and greatest parts, and if you stick to parts that’re 1-2 years old, the prices are quite reasonable. Unless you’re doing some really top-end shit on your PC, DDR4 RAM will work just fine for you, and if you are doing something that’s too intensive to work on older parts, then discussion about “decent” gaming PCs doesn’t really apply to you.
If everyone, them included, keeps investing in garbage that sabotages sustainable IT development as they’ve done with the latest server farm crazes, not only consoles will sell better but also streaming subscription services. Local, personal and somewhat private computing will be reserved for a select and wealthy few if we keep in this direction with pricier components, unoptimized code and unleashed billionaires.
Given that PC games tend to be way cheaper, this means the overall sales volume must be almost double that of consoles.
Didn’t Sony literally just decide to stop making PC ports, too? What a stupid decision. I bought quite a few Sony games I otherwise wouldn’t have if they weren’t on PC.
It’s typical Sony hubris, every time they get to be top dog they start making shitty decisions like this. They genuinely believe that their exclusives will push console sales, they think they’ve baited PC-only gamers and now that they “have them”, they can take the games away and generate console sales.
And you know what? It might move some consoles, sure, but it won’t move as many as they think, because there are plenty of games to play and the vast majority of people will not pay $600+ to play one or two games.
I guarantee you Sony will come back within 5 years. But even if they don’t, who cares? There’s so many games to play. Missing out on a Spider-Man game won’t kill me.
