New report says PC games are outselling console games, calling PC gaming a 'bright spot' in a troubled industry
New report says PC games are outselling console games, calling PC gaming a 'bright spot' in a troubled industry
Everything's coming up computers.
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I hope we get another time where you can build a PC that matches or surpasses the latest consoles, at a lower cost. It's been a while.
People who say "it was never the case" are misremembering history.
Yes, consoles are sold at a loss initially. However, the price-to-performance ratio (in terms of frames per second) consistently decreases over time, regardless of what console manufacturers do.
For example, the original PlayStation was released in 1994 at a cost of $600. By the end of 1999, just six years later, you could emulate its games on a fairly inexpensive, older PC. In 1994, while the first Doom ran on a relatively costly i386/i486, it was impossible to match the arcade-quality graphics of PlayStation games like Tekken 1 to 3. However, by the time the PlayStation 2 was released, it became feasible to use an affordable older PC with a low to mid-range GPU to exceed the graphical capabilities of any console available at that time.
The only period when consoles were truly cheap—meaning they were sold at a loss—was during the first few months after their release. If you already owned a PC, you could easily surpass the performance of newly released consoles by simply upgrading your GPU.
When has that ever been the case?
The age-old tradeoff has always been that consoles are restrictive and un-upgradable, but generally cheaper than building a PC due to fixed parts costs and loss-leader strategies.
PS3 era. $600 for the PS3 or ~$500 for a PC that performed similarly if you just wanted to play games and not also include an expensive ass Blu-ray drive.
So what you're saying is it was possible to undercut the ps3 in cost of you weren't building a machine of equivalent capability.
I've been gaming on the PC since the 386 days and I don't ever recall a time where a PC was ever cheaper than a console.
With new parts yes, but except for a brief period after a new console is released you can buy used PC parts for playing games of similar graphically fidelity for about the same price or slightly cheaper.
