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
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.
Only a tiny minority of PC gamers pay monthly for anything.
That’s simply not true.
Spending one fifth of that will perform better than a $750 console (PS5 Pro)
I mean ya… That’s pretty much how I feel.
I was into the PCMR sub back when you could build a machine that ran better than the current console generation for the same price as the two main consoles. And it’s not like consoles perform so above and beyond a PC that there’s little difference today; the PC hardware just exploded in price so it costs so much more to make something that runs as good or better than a PS5, which is sold at a loss.
It’s possible to build a competent gaming manchine if you’re ok with 1080p. A ten year old card still runs 1080p perfectly fine.
I have a Ryzen 5500 on a radeon 550. It plays mostly everything at 720 to 1080. It’ll do lite 4k but it does what it needs to do.
I bought a Acer nitro with a 3050 in it for my teenager. 🤷 It’s perfectly fine. She plays mostly counter strike anyway.
I play a bunch of indie stuff and remasters… Unless you want 60fps in cyberpunk in 4k ultra ray tracing… You can get into a pretty decent build for well under 1k.
My VR rig built just before the first COVID lockdowns is already capable of keeping up with the PS5 in performance mode; but it was also about $900 mostly from the GPU (a 1660 Super because the 2070 Cyberpunk Edition card was sold out).
I don’t need 4K, but I definitely would like to be able to have raytracing in Cyberpunk, specifically. It’s the only game I’ve seen them used beyond shadows and it looks amazeballs. My GPU is one generation too old to even support RTX, tho. Or DLSS!
Yeah but you have to spend so much money on games and with PC you can almost play anything for free and games add up fast
Yep so many amazing games for $5-20 on steam sales often not even that old
That’s only part of the story. Consoles have many benefits, like warranty, consistency, drivers, software, etc. I built some reasonable budget gaming machines back then, but I still bought consoles and still do to this day because of their superiority.
Subscription to access multiplayer on third party servers 🤡
I agree you are a clown but I’m not familiar with that because as a decent person, I don’t play multiplayer.
The whole idea of “superiority” is so dumb. People should get what works for them.
For most normies/noobs, they don’t even know how to start thinking of gaming PCs. No ideas of GPUs. Don’t want to make the wrong choice and overpay for an ancient system labeled “gaming ready”. Consoles work great in not having to think about anything and just playing. Also you get exclusives. It comes at the cost of higher price, online subscriptions, system lock in, few options for mid cycle upgrade, etc.
PC works great for me and I haven’t had a console in 20 years. I’d recommend it to anyone who is even slightly inclined to learn the basics. The Steam Deck would be a great console experience for anyone…but the sales number compared to the Switch and lack of mainstream recognition shows that a lot of people don’t have an appetite for PC gaming. Fine, use what works for you.
Another problem is that online PC communities have a real obsession with going “top tier”. Most people can do perfectly well with last generation parts and secondhand or refurbished bargains. Budget gaming, retro gaming, patient gaming, are all valid and cheap.
The whole idea of “superiority” is so dumb. People should get what works for them.
I think you’re taking an unserious humorous thing too seriously.
For most normies/noobs, they don’t even know how to start thinking of gaming PCs. No ideas of GPUs. Don’t want to make the wrong choice and overpay for an ancient system labeled “gaming ready”.
I doubt the person who is this afraid of gaming pcs also worried about being ripped off.
Also, there are more resources than ever to figure out a decent build or to ask people to tell you if a build is decent.
Another problem is that online PC communities have a real obsession with going “top tier”.
They most certainly do not. I don’t think you frequent these places.
Probably the most common build combo is a 9600, 9060XT 16GB build. Thats around 1100 USD. Thats just a bit more than a console while performing a lot better.
As for second hand or refurbished, that can help, but you sometimes can be getting a worse value, as they fall out of support faster or don’t support modern features and you have to be ok with them not being good at ray tracing for instance, or not doing well with ai upscaling, or not being able to do framegen. There are third party software solutions for all of the above, but most people don’t want to deal with the effort required for those. Luckily FSR4 might be coming to some older AMD cards.
Me with my 5090 I have only played 4.5 games on because I hate dark patterns
Wait the section on “Psychological Dark Patterns” sounds kind of over inclusive. Leveling up and progressing are thing that give a sense of accomplishment. Granted, things like cs2 skins are a form of manipulation. But you can’t tell me that making a build on a game like DND or building a world you like on Minecraft are “dark patterns”
Leveling up and progressing are thing that give a sense of accomplishment.
Indeed. They are built to trigger your reward system rather than having you feel that naturally from the gameplay.
I absolutely think those are included and utterly hate grinding.
But you can’t tell me that making a build on a game like DND or building a world you like on Minecraft are “dark patterns”
Where are you getting that from there?
Clarification. I’m way to asleep and meant wow, not DND. Forget I said anything. I still think I’m right. But I’m not in the correct state to even formulate coherent sentences
I understand this is a joke, but 15k? Wtf. I think you meant server, not PC
The number gets higher and higher every time a console dweeb makes the argument that they’re not constantly fucking themselves.
Flagship Nvidia is around $10k. Easy to spend at least another $5k on the rest of the computer+setup (monitors, peripherasls…).
That isn’t something normal people buy you can spend any amount on anything but its really fringe rich people shit.
That’s not a gaming GPU, that’s workstation GPU. Meme says “gamers”. I genuinely don’t think you can spend 15k even if you went for limited edition.
An ROG 5090 Dhahab Edition is half of the $15k. Add a boutique case, custom cooling loop, overkill RAM and storage, and you just might hit $15k. Definitely a stretch though.
I did not even realize you could run games on these GPUs… I guess I learn something every day. It would still be hard to spend 5k on the rest of the PC without throwing money away on visuals and other performance unrelated stuff, but I guess you may be able to do it depending on what you still consider performance improvements…
I will say, way back in college I had a friend get two $600 graphics cards so he could play Morrowind: Oblivion at max settings. And I was just kinda dumbfounded, cause the upscaling simply wasn’t that good.
Did Oblivion even offer proper support for SLI/Crossfire?
I’m going to say it did, based on the fuzziest of memories from twenty years ago
I can use keyboard and trackball on PC.
Consoles to the last are configured for right-hand dominance, and not all games support keybinding. In fact, a lot of them don’t support point-and-click either.
Also I have productivity applications on PC.
When it comes to accessibility, PC dominates.
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.
I’ll second this, actually. I used to hate on PC gaming for around a decade or so because it always seemed to prohibitively expensive to me compared to a console. But after building my very first PC with used parts off ebay for around 300-400€ in total, I think, I can confirm that it works really well overall.
Most of the games I’ve played so far perform really well, some even play on highest settings (and that’s with just a 1080 ti), and it’s a PC, so multitasking, office work, homework and whatnot are all possible. Running the OS and games off an SSD makes loading times quite fast compared to the PS5’s SSD, sometimes even faster.
And I haven’t spent a single Euro on games because of a plethora of 🏴☠️ options, which is possible on console depending on the console, but ultimately hinges on jailbreaking your console and voiding a potential warranty.
Overall, I’m very pleased with my PC experience right now. Ever since building the PC, I haven’t played on console, and that’s coming from someone who was playing on console pretty much exclusively since around 2017
Are we still on this exhausted argument? What’s next Apple or Samsung? People need to chill, just do you, enjoy your gaming experience on whatever you like
Its a funny image with PC owners laughing at ourselves for paying exorbitantly more for a silly crown and you are angry about an “argument”.
Found the console gamer
That would be me and yes, I am morally and intellectually superior to all PC gamers combined.
Than*
$400 plus a subscription for the privilege of playing online + some amount of money for a computer anyway
I gave up on PC gaming years ago. Turns out sitting on a coach and being 10’ ft away from a screen is way easier on my body and my eyes than being hunched over a desk 1’ away from a monitor.
Also no driver incompatibility bullshit. Most console games just work w/o me having to custom edit .ini or other files.
You must have given up not years, but decades ago.
Also no driver incompatibility bullshit. Most console games just work w/o me having to custom edit .ini or other files
What century do you think this is?
You can plug a PC into a TV and even use Xbox and PS controllers if you like. Can have the PC auto start Steam in Big Screen mode so you’d seldom need to use a mouse+KB (trackballs or keyboards with trackpads are best in this scenario). Nothing wrong with console gaming though (well, besides supporting all the non-free software, locked-down systems, and shit companies; but most games you likely play are these as well).
I did this a while back. To be fair a “mini” ITX case is still relatively enormous, and I stopped upgrading it when graphics cards turned into magic beans for crypto-bros and got mega expensive.
You actually had to edit files? Outside of me breaking things first (yay mods) I’ve only had to edit 1 file ever, and that was mass effect 1 on an old and laptop that was uhh… not suitable for the task given to it.
Have you used a PC since 1993? There have been new developments.
Guys, you don’t have to downvote someone because they have an experience that happens to be many standard deviations away from the mean. This is what consoles are for. Nintendo still shines for people like this :)
Dam is this a copy pasta? 😅
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 miss the days when $500 could build a “console killer”
These days its like 1500. But you still get all the advantages like being able to do whatever you want with it like using productive software to actually do work. Streaming, editing, rendering, 3D modeling or printing, game dev, etc
It is nowhere near 1500.
More like 800.
For a nice PC that will last you a while 1100 (for like a 9600 + 9060XT)
You don’t have to justify buying a PC to your mum and dad because it can do Word anymore lol
You will also most likely still make that difference back over the cycle of one console generation through better game deals and no subscription fees for online play.
Also: INDIE GAMES 🎉✨
Because getting your game published in Sonys or Microsofts store is horrible afaik.
For Xbox its a little bit easier since they launched ID@xbox and pushed it the last few years. Not perfect, but way better than Sony
I’m still a PC player through and through, but I will say that the game subscriptions that give you access to AAA games (albeit sometimes a bit after launch) is pretty enticing. Obviously you get better sales and whatnot through Steam, but not having to shell out 50-70 dollars for a new game is pretty cool.
You didn’t hear? That shit is getting nerfed.
My roommate mentioned there was a price increase recently. It is pretty pricey.
I miss the days when $500 were enough to buy a console.
That was a brief period when consoles were way over priced for the components they had.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
They still are
If they were, then you could build a PC for cheaper.
You can. But with used parts which feels like has always been the case.
You still easily can with second hand components.
Thanks etherium
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
Wasn’t that just around the second half of the PS360 generation and the PS4 era until crypto blew up?
PCs were always pretty expensive since my childhood in the 1980s.
I want to say late 2000’s to early 2010’s was when my friends and I all built our own PCs for about $500.
What console sells for 400 bucks?
Steam deck lol
its a pc tho 😭
Tim Cook: “I KNEW IT”
This meme is from like 2014
That’ll get you… The lowest storage tier Series S. Or a Nintendo Switch OLED. Yay.
Switch 1.
PS5 (discless edition) did until the USD took an almighty shit.
