Why do people keep reposting this shit?
Which console costs 400$?
Which reasonably price optimized PC costs 15k$?
Yes PCs are more expensive than consoles, but they also hold more value, are more versatile and have lower costs for the Games themselves.
To each their own, we’re alle gamers.
Fine, im in Canada and a ps5 costs $500 and a decent current gen gaming pc costs about $3000 where I am. And no I am no interested in building a pc anymore than I am building a ps5. So off the shelf you’re looking at a 1.5-2k pc just to match the ps5. So not 15k but easily triple the cost of a ps5.
What I like about consoles is that I know the game will always work on my console. I could buy a top end pc and it won’t play next years top games that well
Idk about the prices in canada but 3000 CAD shouldn’t give you a “decent current gen gaming pc”. This is already high end territory where you’re already burning money unnecessarly just to have the latest an greatest. For 2500 CAD you can get a prebuild 9070 XT + 7800X3D system (here). This system destroys the PS5 performance wise. I can get 240-300 FPS in the Finals while the PS5 can get a max of 120 FPS in performance mode with hits to the visual fidelity.
And yes a PS5 is 579 CAD as far as I can see, so a lot cheaper.
However as I stated a PC can run way more different games even without taking emulation into account. Furthermore on PS5 you have to pay 110 CAD/year to play online and PC games generally are cheaper than console games. So there is a significant amount of money you’ll save on the software.
Additionally you kinda are forced to buy a new console when the new generation arrives while I can use my PC for the newest games as long as I want to or the hardware just can’t handle it anymore.
And lastly a PC can also be used for non gaming stuff. You can even get use of the performance for 3D modeling, Video editing, running LLMs or whatever.
So as I stated before both have their use cases, a PC is definetly more expensive up front buy it also just offers more value. At the end it doesn’t matter and everyone can play games on the hardware they want to.
$400 console
The only thing that qualifies is an Xbox series S, even Switch 2 is $450 lmao.
Even funnier when you consider “PC” consoles like Steam Deck or Legion which gives you a even wider access to games, including exclusives thanks to emulation.
Hell Sony and Microsoft gave up on the console exclusive system because PC & Steam demonstrated the expanded market is worth the tradeoff when your console hardware is basically a computer.
That didn’t used to be the case even up to the PS4 when the hardware was still targeted for games like high VRAM, but that’s no longer the case.
It gets even better with Switch emulation because it was a glorified Android tablet that was already outdated on arrival, meaning you can play Switch games even on your phone thanks to ARM instruction pass-through techniques.
The real reason I’m better than the console plebs is that I still play multiplayer on twenty-year-old games.
Yeah, I just played CS 1.5 with my colleagues during a break. That shit just never gets old.
When 1.6 came out I was stubborn and refused to install Steam which was needed for it. But I eventually did and it eventually grew on me even though recoil and everything is a bit different. Still using my 22 year old steam account.
So old school of you to play 1.5 instead of 1.6
it hits different. dunno.)))) 1.6 feels corporate although not as much as latter iterations.
Don’t need to buy a new console every few years.
When getting to slow can upgrade single components.
Cost/performance is basically on par with consoles at the moment.
Completely ignores the fact that consoles are a type of computer and the gaming companies can not sell console + games at +/-0 or they’ll go out of business.The fuck you on about?
I over the last 15 years I’ve bought a total of 4 consoles. Ranging from $300 and below, and only 1 of those was an upgrade. The other 3 were different consoles to play different exclusives. We’ll just call it $1200 plus $150 for extra controllers and headsets. How much have you spent on your PC since you bought it?
Games were free.
this guy gets it
I’ll chime in:
Since purchase at $1200 for a custom build in 2020, I’ve spent $500 upgrading storage and my video card for my PC. It can push most modern games at 80fps with ray tracing on low and all other settings on high. Leveraging frame-gen it can do 2k120.
It also holds about 5TB of music and movies, and hosts them on a server which I can access anywhere via a URL pointed to my tunnel.
It also has a DAW, an IDE, and a Nextcloud instance, also accessable anywhere.
$1700 in for total liberation from the tech overlords is worth it. The 500+ games in the steam family library are just a bonus.
That is an incredible price in 2020. The graphics cards alone were going for that much.
I went for a lower end GPU from the previous generation at the time, a GTX 1650 the types of game I was playing at the time accomadated that decision.
May I ask you, how much did you spend on games?
I am cheap. I only buy games on sale or f2p. Wouldn’t be fair comparison. Probably less than $500 in 15 years.
800€
For $800 I think you can get a laptop that is more powerful than consoles, with similar GPU power, but you also get all the benefits of PC gaming. You can’t even mod most console games, which is reason enough to never buy a console. It’s just a way inferior way to game.
Where are you living where you can get a good console for $400?
2002
thats how much i paid for a ps5
Divide PC by 10 and add 300 dollars to console.
I miss the days when $500 could build a “console killer”
That was a brief period when consoles were way over priced for the components they had.
That period repeats every 3-5 years approximatly towards the end of a generation but before the new generation is announced.
We’re at that point now. Hard to believe, but the PS5 has been out for five years now.
The reason it’s not happening this time is because Moore’s Law is dead. The original formulation was that cost of integrated components would be cut in half every x months. The value of x changed around over the years, but settled on 24. That cost factor is gone and probably won’t come back without a major breakthrough.
There are improvements in the size of integrated components (which often gets mistakenly labeled as Moore’s Law), but they aren’t getting cheaper anymore.
Ps5 sets my record for most dead joysticks, followed by the Nintendo Switch joycon disaster.
PS4 I had a few controllers die, but that was parts physically breaking.
PS3 I never lost a controller.
I have to go back to N64 for any other broken controllers where the sticks die or buttons break.
PS3 I had to get a new controller, but only because the dog ate the analog sticks lmao. Still using the Mini USB cable it came with 🫡
I had to replace the Micro USB port in two DS4s. I don’t even blame Sony for it, Micro USB is ass. I do blame them for both controllers getting stick drift later though.
I don’t use the PS5 enough for the controller to break.
I’m 3/3 on ps5 controllers breaking.
I bought the pro controller when it came out and it hasn’t broken.
There was a generation where it was true at the launch of the console. That’s the period I’m talking about. Beating a 5 year old machine is hardly worth bragging about.
We are talking about price relative to performace, not performance in general.
But the cost of the hardware is anyways not so relevant when the price difference of the software easily makes up the difference.
Yes, and you could beat the price of a PS4 at release with a pc that performed the same. No other console generation had such bad price/performance
Nah it’s the GPU market. Cryptocurrency briefly exploded and now AI is sucking up all of the GPU manufacturing capacity. Back in 2019 I got my RX580 for $175. The AMD 9070 that released this year is a tier down from that and had an MSRP of $550, but an actual price more like $650. The sweet spot of value PC building has shifted from $750 to $1,500 in just a few years. Some of that is just general inflation that affects all parts, but roughly half of that increase is just from the GPU.
It’s impacting consoles too. Consoles uses to get cheaper over time, with both price drops to existing models and new, cheaper models being released (Sony’s Slim models, things like the Wii Family Edition and Wii Mini, the DSLite, etc). Looking at this generation… The original PS5 with a disc drive debuted at $500 in 2020. The “Slim” version also debuted at $500, and just got a price increase to $550. They released a PS5 Pro at $700, and just increased it to $750.
Nintendo is doing it too. The Switch was $300 for its entire life, and now that the Switch 2 is out consumers would typically expect a price cut to move the existing stock. Instead, Nintendo raised the price to $330. The OLED model went from $350 to $400, and the Lite went from $200 to $230.
And of course Microsoft is in on it too. It’s more complicated to write up since they have different storage variants of the Series S|X, but for example a Series S 512GB was $300 at launch (For some reason I remember seeing them for $250, but maybe that was a Black Friday sale or something). Now it’s $400!
Aren’t a lot of those price increases US centric due to asinine tariffs.
They’ve increased in other countries too. The PS5 digital edition costs £70 more today than it did at launch. In 2024 Sony increased the Japan price of all PS5 versions by ¥13,000.
The tariffs aren’t helping, but this has been a trend for years. The gaming console market is not very volatile- prices changes in the US usually happen once every few years, not every few months. The tariffs keep fluctuating all over the place and I would not be shocked if there are more pricing adjustments for consoles specifically next year.
You can blame crypto, you can blame AI, but when it comes down to it everything is worth what people are willing to pay. Clearly companies are pushing that further and further and people keep paying.
I recall it being a period of at least 10 years. A prior generation GPU would run about $150-200. The CPU/Mobo was the most expensive part
You still easily can with second hand components.
Yeah, but all those people buying wonky 2GB “PS4 equivalent” GPUs ended up pretty quiet when games later in the generation started using more and more VRAM.
The PS4 CPU was a joke, but it could use a lot of textures.
It really depends on whether you want the newest games with 128k graphics. I game on a 5 year old Thinkpad* and a first gen switch and am happy about it.
*granted, it was refurbished and still like 2700€, but the same laptop would be cheaper today
The consoles are “cheap” because the controllers, games, and subscription services are expensive.
It’s far, far, far cheaper to game on a PC in the long run. You can buy a pc capable of playing many games for as little as $300 (gmtek or similar micro pc sporting high performance amd cpu). If you want better graphics, you plug a gpu into that for $260 or so (Radeon 9060).
Steam is crazy cheap. Multiple sales a year, and if you don’t like a game you can get a full refund. Free AAA games every week as well from GOG, Epic, and rarely but surely, also Steam.
Yes, Yes, this is true! (I say after spending multiple thousands on a gaming PC where this is absolutely not true).
My Xbox and PlayStation both came with a full normal controller, and console games are constantly on sale. I have absolutely no idea what you’re trying to get at here.
The point of the submission is that PC dumbfucks don’t know how to compare apples to apples. Console gaming is objectively superior due to the benefits of things like warranty, consistency, drivers, software, etc.
Software and driver issues like clicking update? Waiting for a reboot?
The same one year warranty that your PC has?
A controller is like 20 bucks. My PC can play the vast majority of games ever made out of the box, and for free if I’m willing to commit some crimes.
Let’s compare a 6 year price without games.
PC gaming
800 gaming PC 200 mid cycle update to GPU 3-5 years in
PS5
500 non-gaming PC because your ps5 isn’t a useful alternative 500 ps5 650 ps5 pro 4 years in 720 for PlayStation online basic at 10 per month
1000 vs 2370
Laughing at console gamers spending more than the cost of a basic computer on the privilege of using it online via your own internet which you also pay for
What are you updating the GPU to for $200? A 1060?
Most recently I got a nice radeon 6600 with 8GB VRAM for 100 I guess.
Reading this gave me a headache
Would you like a meme with 8 or less characters and a 2nd grade reading level to calm you down?
PS5
500 non-gaming PC
Come on, dude. Firstly, you can get a non-gaming PC for under $200 easy. Hell, if you know where to look, you can get it for free.
500 ps5 650 ps5 pro 4 years in
Why not just… not upgrade the PS5? Save yourself $650. If you want to “balance” things, the PC guy can save $200 on their own upgrade.
Wait for the PS6, which will be out in '27/'28 and just enjoy the OG console that was released in '20 for the life of the platform.
Like, this is obviously not an apple to apple comparison. And that’s spotting you a generous $800 PC build out of the gate. You’re simply not building a PS5 quality rig in 2020 for $800.
720 for PlayStation online basic at 10 per month
Do I get to charge the PC owner the release price of every PSO title released for free? Because that’s going to come out far higher than $720 over six years.
Are you playing any MMOs on that PC? Should we be charging you the base rate for those as well?
I’m not even a PS5 guy. I tapped out at 4 and game on my PC happily. But I’m not going to pretend console gamers are doing 3x my spend just because it’s possible to do so.
Only a tiny minority of PC gamers pay monthly for anything.
You can’t upgrade the PS5, and the sale price of your 5-year-old unit is like $100.
Free games aren’t included in the 10 per month.
The cost of 18 per month to also have old games costs 1300 over 6 years.
The PC you can get for $200 will be awful to use or die within 3 years or both. It will be ridiculous to repair, so you will buy another 200 special hating the shit you bought both times.
Basically at the root a PC and a console are both good for about 6 years but the 700-1300 you pay for online is going to dwarf the buy up from acceptable PC to gaming PC+ hardware.
Cheap PC are the value option expensive pc are the quality option.
Consoles are kind of in between.
Are we talking about a new 200$ pc?
Because if you buy used you can get a very decent non gaming pc for that money.
Maybe I got lucky, my current desktop was 350€ used with a pretty modern and fast CPU (5800x) and a somewhat outdated GPU (vega56).
350€ = 405 USD once you add in a mouse keyboard and monitor you are over 500 the figure I used. Decrease your figures further and it gets shittier fast.
You could always attach the pc to the TV, and if you don’t have one you’d need one for the console anyways.
And my screens were like 17,50 each also used obvs. Fair point about the peripheries though…
And my pc would be overkill if you buy a console for gaming.
Using a TV for general computing would be fairly broken due to font rendering and DPI. Comparing used anything is fraught because its filled with caveats and isn’t repeatable.
Fair points, my situation doesn’t apply to everyone.
I occasionally use my htpc for light office work, the terrible ergonomics are the only problem In that case.
We would have to include used game consoles too then, which I think is fair. If we are talking about just the desktop box and no peripherals though, I think we could make an equivalent xbox one or ps5 for close to the same price. Thats assuming the purchaser is tech savvy enough to navigate deals at places like newegg and microcenter.
Only a tiny minority of PC gamers pay monthly for anything.
That’s simply not true.
I didn’t say they didn’t watch netflix or have internet.
PC gamers don’t pay a monthly fee connected to their gaming.
So PC GamePass isn’t a thing? If Valve offered a solid subscription offering, gamers would be all over it.
I think the point is that you don’t have to pay ANYTHING per month to play apps or games you already fully paid for online whereas not paying for playstation online means you lose that entire aspect of your own device whereas with a ps5 if you stop paying sony you can no longer even use netflix despite paying netflix your isp and sony for their hardware. They use the fact that they control your device to effectively blackmail you by making third party apps contingent on paying their blackmail.
That’s not true. You can use Netflix without PSPlus. You can even play Fortnite (and a few others, mostly the online only games) without it.
Is liquid cooling even worth it these days? I’ve always used air cooling and just vacuumed my pc every once and a while.
Depends. For performance? Not really. For sound? Definitely. Unless you go for one of those passive air cooled PC cases (15+ kg of aluminum and no fans), you won’t get anything that is quieter than a liquid cooler with a 360mm rad. With a custom loop and a GPU water block you can get your PC to essentially silent.
Nah, I’ve always air cooled. I’d rather have a chonky cooler instead of yet another failure point.
Not really. Outside of the commercial usage (like data centers), liquid-cooing is used more just for show.
I swear even back in the liquid cooling heyday of 2005 it still wasn’t worth it. If you could afford liquid cooling, you could afford a case and a mobo with more fans
Over 7 years, you’d have to pay $560 to play online on a PS5, assuming they don’t increase the price again. The cheapest PS5, without the disc drive (which is a bad decision if you like cheap games), costs $500.
You can easily build a PC more powerful than a PS5 for $1060, and that’s before you factor in cheaper games.
Over those 7 years, you get 252 free games for the PS5. Meaning the average value of those games has to be like 2.2 for the subscription to pay for itself
They’re not free, you had to pay to access them. The 252 are useless unless you play them and not just a half-dozen titles you like.
And once the sub stops you lose access to the games.
You know what you do get to keep? The games Epic gets giving out to bribe people into using their launcher. I’ve hoarded over 200 games from them, of which I’ve played maybe 30.
I’ve stopped because either it’s been trash games or it’s something that I’d rather play on steam.
Even their exclusives I decided to just wait on because the epic launcher blows.
I don’t think I’m in the majority but I think a non-negligible amount of people would pay a premium to not use epic.
I used some software they gave out, but otherwise I sit on the horde like a digital dragon.
I’m certain you can build a $15K USD computer, I bet Linus Tech Tips does it regularly, but idk who tf is doing that when an nVidia 3090Ti is only $1080 and is ranked #23 on PassMark.
Yes, and if you’re genuinely spending $15,000 on a rig you are not competing with a goddamn Playstation; at that point you’re either mixing it with low end datacenters or you’ve now got a ziggurat of monitors on your desk that could backdrop a Daft Punk concert. I just built a pretty much top of the line (AMD based, mind you) machine a few months ago for under $3000. I could have gotten away with less, but I didn’t feel like it.
I suspect that many morons with nothing but decades-old experience, if even any to begin with, still have no comprehension of just how cheap computers are.
Why are you considering buying a 3090 Ti for $1080??? It’s an old card and shouldn’t be near that amount when you can get better performance for less money out of a 9070 xt or 5070 ti.
It’s an old #23rd best card in the world, complete without the faulty newer nVidia cables and sockets, but yeah theres no way people need to spend $15k.
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I built my friend a cheap gaming PC. If your target is 60fps 1080 its dirt cheap. The 3060 still handles modern titles and its a few hundred. Amd and Intel also have great budget offerings. 9060 and b580 are great cards.
I have a 3080ti and its even less, and I’m still on max settings in every game at 1440p.
If it wasn’t for Slyrim and thousands of mods, I would agree with you😅
Minecraft would also like a word!
It’s been a while since I played modded Minecraft, but absolutely!
I’ve got a modpack that graphically overhauls literally everything and Skyrim runs fine. It came out over a decade ago and made on the same engine as FO:3, it’s probably hitting the upper limits of its resource requirements if it hasn’t already.
Ever try Lorerim?
I actually went with a 3080 that had more VRAM than the Ti version at the cost of slightly lower performance, but this unintentionally crashes some games and applications which are not made to handle more than the 4GB memory limit in some 32 bit softwares. It’s too powerful lmao. Someday we’re going to encounter a similar issue when cards regularly reach up to 64GB VRAM.
There is a program that fixes that iirc, I used it for New Vegas. Somebody here will know what it’s called.
ENBoost?
Like any hobby, they have their own expenses. I only bought a PS5 to play GTAVI early
some $2k beats a console and you get more games, cheaper price, and can do whatever you want with it
so if you’re already getting a computer, it just makes sense
This argument made more sense 20 years ago. Now there’s a lot more people who just don’t need a desktop.
But they need a console?
For a lot less than a desktop that does decent at gaming, yes.
idk about that. I have both and I still prefer using the desktop at home because I can get a much nicer performance out of it than connecting an external display to the laptop. Even for ordinary things like watching a YT video it makes a difference.
people might not need it, but no one who’s not a game developer needs a console either
“Needs” is a tricky word, here.
People want to play games. If they don’t need a desktop otherwise, it’s fine to choose a console for games. The number of people who need a desktop is a lot less than it was 20 years ago.
