2w ago

The PlayStation Network has been taken completely offline across all platforms for more than half a day, preventing online gaming, store purchases, game updates, and more

www.pcgamer.com Update: The PlayStation Network appears to be coming back online after nearly a day's outage, but there's still no word from Sony on what happened

Feels good to be a PC gamer right about now.

Update: The PlayStation Network appears to be coming back online after nearly a day's outage, but there's still no word from Sony on what happened

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35 comments

It's still crazy to me that people will pay 30% tax on all their games and then fork over another $120/year just to be able to play them. Or in Playstation's case, to not play them.
- The new game price difference between PC and console is largely gone. There aren’t many games released simultaneously on both console and pc that aren’t $70 nowadays. I definitely agree on the PSN cost though. Fortunately it takes years for that subscription cost to catch up to the difference in hardware coats.
  
  I believe the 30% is referring to the share of revenue that Sony takes per transaction.
  
  That doesn’t make sense. Steam takes the same cut. I’m sure all of the vendors do.
  
  Epic made a whole selling point of taking less
  
  They are also a dickbag company with a garbage platform.
  
  Doesn’t matter. Not about the quality, nor the morons downvoting me. The conversation is about percentage and a misconception. Steam takes 30%. PlayStation takes 30%. Same with Microsoft and probably Nintendo. 30% is also the "small" portion Google and Apple take on their platforms. I only know of Epic and GoG that take less. We're talking about numerical fact, not opinion, and I can't help but notice it's the platforms that are comfortable having a monopoly that take 30% while the ones that publicly promote competition (or at least claim to, to be fair) that take less.
  
  They slipped my mind. Unfortunately I think they’ll remain the only ones.
  
  Not for cyberpunk 2077 on GoG, Assassin Creed [stuff] on uPlay, whatever EA thing EA is selling on Origin etc. Also, you can sell steam keys for your own gane, on your own store, without having to pay Valve.
  
  It's equally stupid that we put up with their rent seeking.
  
  Epic’s cut is 10%
  
  Yea I’d forgotten about Epic.
  
  Big games yeah, but I don't buy those anyway myself. The 30% tax is what Xbox/Playstation take from each game sale. Steam on PC takes 30% too, but doesn't require a subscription ontop of that to use their online services.
  You can build a PC as powerful as a console for near enough the same price these days and you save massively in the long term from cheaper games and no subscription. If you have the know how. But yeah, the barrier of entry is lower for a console for sure, but that gap is only closing more and more each year with PCs becoming more accessible.
  
  That used to be the case. I’d definitely be on your side of the argument before this generation. A $500 investment 4 years ago in an Xbox or PlayStation would run circles around a $500 investment into PC parts back then. Heck, I’d be interested if you could find something similarly powered nowadays. The GPU alone gets you to a digital only ps5.
  
  The Arc cards are stronger than the PS5 and are like $200-250 new, you could get used RX 7600/6600XT for cheaper than that. There's definitely paths to a PS5 equivalent PC for a similar price, and even if you spend $100, $200, $300 more, that pays off in 1, 2 or 3 years anyway.
  
  I thought the arc cards required a beefy cpu to get the most out of them? Used components are kinda cheating the argument because you could just buy a used console. I remember mathing out the pc argument and I just couldn’t justify it. The included ps plus games would also hurt the argument for stuff like steam sales.
  If you played the same games, it didn’t make sense for me go pc. The only real use case I could argue was for the Steam storefront itself (and if you take advantage of fee Epic games). I don’t know whether console or pc benefits more from patient gaming or for buying mostly new games. Like… it’s not clear cut either way for a lot of use cases.
  
  For modest definitions of "beefy". There are budget friendly options that will work just fine with a B-series Arc card, like an i5-12400.
  
  There's probably loads of builds online with new components, I haven't built a low end PC for a while, so I am not sure on the market. As I said though you have to consider the lifespan and the savings, even just 3 years later you have saved $360. And you can definitely build a PC that is better than a PS5 Pro for $1060, peripherals included even.
  With discs falling out of fashion, games are absolutely cheaper on PC for patient gamers. As you say though, the savings do depend on what games you are interested in personally. Big publishers are much more stingy on giving discounts in sales.
  
  I’m just not seeing much mentioned about inexpensive PCs nowadays. The PS5 Pro basically has a 7800XT in it, and that’s like $500 on its own. If you don’t play multiplayer games often, or at all, or you don’t care for the ps plus games, you no longer need to even play for ps plus.
  I think the days of PC gaming being the de facto answer for value gaming are gone. It’s entirely situational and I’d personally say the pendulum has swung the console route. It’s unfortunate that we now have limited technological progress on top of expensive GPUs. Remember when you could wait 4-5 years and get a 100% increase in performance for roughly what you spent previously?
  
  The PC market is growing faster than the console market, the value of consoles has completely plateaued.
  You can build a PC for just slightly more, an added cost you recoup anyway after a couple years. You can do a lot more with a PC than a console, you have upgrade flexibility, your library of games will always be playable, you can even emulate and play console games.
  There's no reason to buy a console if you put a bit of effort in, their only appeal is the initial plug and play, which you can do with a PC anyway if you buy prebuilt.
  
  Arc cards won't play half of my library. Albeit cheaper and a step in right direction, their driver game is worse than AMD in the noughties.
  
  You checked on that recently? The B series is much, much better.
  
  Yes, in older games it's particularly egregious.

35 comments