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- Cheaper than a gaming PC. Of course it depends on your setup but for the same price ($500 MSRP) it would be hard to build a decent rig that plays the current

- Cheaper than a gaming PC. Of course it depends on your setup but for the same price ($500 MSRP) it would be hard to build a decent rig that plays the current gen new games perfectly - It just works. Games can have bugs but no hassle with installation, drivers etc. Games are more or less better optimzed because all the devs are working on the same hardware. No 100s different CPU and GPU. And one operating system - Exclusives. Studios are moving away from it to some extent but some games can still be only played on consoles - Home entertainment system. Youtube, Netflix, blurays etc. That being said I have a gaming PC and consoles too mostly becasue of the exclusives

wongarsu 5y ago
As for how it manages to be cheaper, there's two factors - At the beginning of the release cycle consoles are often sold at a loss, the money is made back from game sales (a $60 PC game costs $70 on console) - It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs". Console hardware isn't high-end, the heavy lifting is done by heavy optimization of the games for the specific hardware
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  That and consoles are basically monster DSPs, benefiting from high-throughput buses and parallel processing in a way that general purpose computers do not. Architecting from the ground up with this in mind means you can build something with cheaper silicon that performs much better for video games
- josefx 5y ago
  > It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs". Sometimes with significant quality downgrades, I remember texture quality of early Skyrim being abyssal because the whole game was console optimized. On the other hand there is cyberpunk which apparently didn't even reliably run on some of the consoles it was released on, no idea if it was because of released date agreements or if it was just a shitty money grab. As far as I understand the great upside of consoles in the past was that the manufacturers strictly vetted the quality of games you could release for them. There have been a few "scandals" where they obviously rescinded those controls to get a game out in time for a specific season only to have it crash and burn. Not sure how strict the controls are now, do they still vet the games strictly or is it just an app store with minimal quality checks?
viraptor 5y ago
> Cheaper than a gaming PC They're subsidised by the game prices. You still pay for it in the end. > Home entertainment system. Youtube, Netflix, blurays etc. You can use a PC in the same way. If you position it well, you can even have a dual purpose work/entertainment PC.
- Aaargh20318 5y ago
  > They're subsidised by the game prices. You still pay for it in the end. How much is a half-decent game PC ? €2000 ? Compare to a €500 console. For €1500 I can buy a lot of 'overpriced' games.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    A half decent PC is in the 800€ to 1000€ range. If you're willing to take some graphical downgrades you can do it for 600-800€ too. How many games can you buy for 500€ max? About 10 or so. Maybe.
    - maccard 5y ago
      You're comparing full price console games to free PC games. There are numerous games on consoles that cost less than €50, and buying the latest AAA releases on PC will cost you more than €50 too
      - zaarn 5y ago
        How many free Console games are there? Much less than PC. It's entirely fair as there is more possibility of free PC games, or them being of negligible cost since you pay lower platform fees. This is in addition to the opportunity costs you incur of not buying a PC or having a lower powered PC as a PC can be used for other things (ie, office work, taxes, other productivity tasks).
        Aaargh20318 5y ago
        >This is in addition to the opportunity costs you incur of not buying a PC or having a lower powered PC as a PC can be used for other things (ie, office work, taxes, other productivity tasks). Work related stuf I do on my work-provided MacBook Pro, that costs me €0. For browsing the web, e-mail and taxes I just use my iPad.
okasaki 5y ago
It's only cheaper if the only thing you're using a PC for is gaming. But most people have other uses for it, so now you need a console + PC. Might as well buy a better PC to do everything.
- nchie 5y ago
  Most people use a laptop (or even tablet) for their everyday needs nowadays, and they likely don't want a heavy and hot gaming laptop for that.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  You can get a decent laptop and a PS5 for the price of a mid-range gaming PC. Now you can do all the same things except you can watch a blu-ray while you type up that report and you don't need to exit out of your game to compile that code.
- Aaargh20318 5y ago
  > now you need a console + PC A lot of people I know use console + Mac.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    I did this for about 7 years (although with a Hackintosh, not a Mac). These days I have my Hackintosh, a gaming PC and a console, but that's obviously only a thing that you can do with a good amount of disposable income.
melff 5y ago
> That being said I have a gaming PC and consoles too mostly becasue of the exclusives That's one of the reasons I hate consoles on an ideological level. Unless there are technical reason that make porting the game so hard that it's just not worth it, the only reason for "exclusives" to exist is to fuck over consumers.
- ThatPlayer 5y ago
  Exclusives aren't unique to consoles. Plenty of games are PC only, and therefore fuck over consumers who do not have a PC. More precisely, they're also Windows only, fucking over consumers who are on Linux or Mac. At the end of the day, very few games on available on everything, and they shouldn't be required to be.
- ChildOfChaos 5y ago
  No it's not. Some of those games are funded and developed wouldn't of been made if it wasn't for the fact they wanted to have games to sell the console. They are not fucking you over by not having it on your system, you just feel annoyed that it's not. It's simply a business decision and marketing tool and because it's valuable you get more and better games than you would of gotten before. If there weren't such exclusives you wouldn't have such incentives and they wouldn't always exist in the first place.
lucideer 5y ago
This list is good but clearly targeted at ps & Xbox. The arguments are a bit different, but even stronger, for 2021's highest selling console (switch) - even cheaper, and not a case of paying later for $70 games - exclusives: by far the biggest draw to switch Interesting enough to spur Valve to launch a portable competitor so it'll be interesting to see how those pros hold up.
- haunter 5y ago
  Oh yeah for sure. Also GamePass is insane value for Xbox and I know a lot of people only buy it for that
  - zeusk 5y ago
    Gamepass ultimate includes gamepass for pc, ea play and Xbox live. Insane amount of value, I haven’t purchased a game other than bf2042 in past two years.
maccard 5y ago
It just works is a huge one. Driver issues and OS versions are such a huge pain even now. Many games require brand new drivers (which very often very very unstable), and the MS store required your windows version to be up to date, and everyone has their story about windows update being stuck for months on end. That's before you get into the "openness" of PC - if you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bought it on the Microsoft store how do you play together? How do you voice chat? What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed?
- zeusk 5y ago
  > you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bought it on the Microsoft store how do you play together? How do you voice chat? Both services support adding non platform games through their shortcut/executable. They also support voice chat for groups and players not in game. > What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed? File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypothetical issues?
  - maccard 5y ago
    > Both services support adding non platform games through their shortcut/executable. That only launches the game through the correct store. If the game doesn't implement cross play, you can't play together. > They also support voice chat for groups and players not in game. But you're trying to be in game with the person, and again if the game doesn't do in-game voice chat, you have to find alternatives. On a console you join a party and the software correctly handles the cases around "do I want to put you in a voice chat channel for your game" (because it has to to pass certification). > File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypothetical issues? Really helpfully closed after 30 days of inactivity. https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/42 https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/42. (I didn't make this bug, but I found it, and just logged onto my xbox instead).
    - zeusk 5y ago
      PC games don’t need “cross play” FYI, you create a server and it is visible for anyone who purchased the game regardless of platform. I haven’t used in game voice for more than a decade now. discord, teamspeak, steam chat, Xbox live all work well and are used by quite a lot of people. Can’t comment on that single issue, but it does look like there was barely any information provided to repro the issue.

wongarsu 5y ago

As for how it manages to be cheaper, there's two factors - At the beginning of the release cycle consoles are often sold at a loss, the money is made back from game sales (a $60 PC game costs $70 on console) - It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs". Console hardware isn't high-end, the heavy lifting is done by heavy optimization of the games for the specific hardware

h0l0cube 5y ago
That and consoles are basically monster DSPs, benefiting from high-throughput buses and parallel processing in a way that general purpose computers do not. Architecting from the ground up with this in mind means you can build something with cheaper silicon that performs much better for video games
josefx 5y ago
> It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs". Sometimes with significant quality downgrades, I remember texture quality of early Skyrim being abyssal because the whole game was console optimized. On the other hand there is cyberpunk which apparently didn't even reliably run on some of the consoles it was released on, no idea if it was because of released date agreements or if it was just a shitty money grab. As far as I understand the great upside of consoles in the past was that the manufacturers strictly vetted the quality of games you could release for them. There have been a few "scandals" where they obviously rescinded those controls to get a game out in time for a specific season only to have it crash and burn. Not sure how strict the controls are now, do they still vet the games strictly or is it just an app store with minimal quality checks?

viraptor 5y ago

> Cheaper than a gaming PC They're subsidised by the game prices. You still pay for it in the end. > Home entertainment system. Youtube, Netflix, blurays etc. You can use a PC in the same way. If you position it well, you can even have a dual purpose work/entertainment PC.

Aaargh20318 5y ago
> They're subsidised by the game prices. You still pay for it in the end. How much is a half-decent game PC ? €2000 ? Compare to a €500 console. For €1500 I can buy a lot of 'overpriced' games.
- zaarn 5y ago
  A half decent PC is in the 800€ to 1000€ range. If you're willing to take some graphical downgrades you can do it for 600-800€ too. How many games can you buy for 500€ max? About 10 or so. Maybe.
  - maccard 5y ago
    You're comparing full price console games to free PC games. There are numerous games on consoles that cost less than €50, and buying the latest AAA releases on PC will cost you more than €50 too
    - zaarn 5y ago
      How many free Console games are there? Much less than PC. It's entirely fair as there is more possibility of free PC games, or them being of negligible cost since you pay lower platform fees. This is in addition to the opportunity costs you incur of not buying a PC or having a lower powered PC as a PC can be used for other things (ie, office work, taxes, other productivity tasks).
      - Aaargh20318 5y ago
        >This is in addition to the opportunity costs you incur of not buying a PC or having a lower powered PC as a PC can be used for other things (ie, office work, taxes, other productivity tasks). Work related stuf I do on my work-provided MacBook Pro, that costs me €0. For browsing the web, e-mail and taxes I just use my iPad.

okasaki 5y ago

It's only cheaper if the only thing you're using a PC for is gaming. But most people have other uses for it, so now you need a console + PC. Might as well buy a better PC to do everything.

nchie 5y ago
Most people use a laptop (or even tablet) for their everyday needs nowadays, and they likely don't want a heavy and hot gaming laptop for that.
salamandersauce 5y ago
You can get a decent laptop and a PS5 for the price of a mid-range gaming PC. Now you can do all the same things except you can watch a blu-ray while you type up that report and you don't need to exit out of your game to compile that code.
Aaargh20318 5y ago
> now you need a console + PC A lot of people I know use console + Mac.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I did this for about 7 years (although with a Hackintosh, not a Mac). These days I have my Hackintosh, a gaming PC and a console, but that's obviously only a thing that you can do with a good amount of disposable income.

melff 5y ago

> That being said I have a gaming PC and consoles too mostly becasue of the exclusives That's one of the reasons I hate consoles on an ideological level. Unless there are technical reason that make porting the game so hard that it's just not worth it, the only reason for "exclusives" to exist is to fuck over consumers.

ThatPlayer 5y ago
Exclusives aren't unique to consoles. Plenty of games are PC only, and therefore fuck over consumers who do not have a PC. More precisely, they're also Windows only, fucking over consumers who are on Linux or Mac. At the end of the day, very few games on available on everything, and they shouldn't be required to be.
ChildOfChaos 5y ago
No it's not. Some of those games are funded and developed wouldn't of been made if it wasn't for the fact they wanted to have games to sell the console. They are not fucking you over by not having it on your system, you just feel annoyed that it's not. It's simply a business decision and marketing tool and because it's valuable you get more and better games than you would of gotten before. If there weren't such exclusives you wouldn't have such incentives and they wouldn't always exist in the first place.

lucideer 5y ago

This list is good but clearly targeted at ps & Xbox. The arguments are a bit different, but even stronger, for 2021's highest selling console (switch) - even cheaper, and not a case of paying later for $70 games - exclusives: by far the biggest draw to switch Interesting enough to spur Valve to launch a portable competitor so it'll be interesting to see how those pros hold up.

haunter 5y ago
Oh yeah for sure. Also GamePass is insane value for Xbox and I know a lot of people only buy it for that
- zeusk 5y ago
  Gamepass ultimate includes gamepass for pc, ea play and Xbox live. Insane amount of value, I haven’t purchased a game other than bf2042 in past two years.

maccard 5y ago

It just works is a huge one. Driver issues and OS versions are such a huge pain even now. Many games require brand new drivers (which very often very very unstable), and the MS store required your windows version to be up to date, and everyone has their story about windows update being stuck for months on end. That's before you get into the "openness" of PC - if you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bought it on the Microsoft store how do you play together? How do you voice chat? What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed?

zeusk 5y ago
> you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bought it on the Microsoft store how do you play together? How do you voice chat? Both services support adding non platform games through their shortcut/executable. They also support voice chat for groups and players not in game. > What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed? File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypothetical issues?
- maccard 5y ago
  > Both services support adding non platform games through their shortcut/executable. That only launches the game through the correct store. If the game doesn't implement cross play, you can't play together. > They also support voice chat for groups and players not in game. But you're trying to be in game with the person, and again if the game doesn't do in-game voice chat, you have to find alternatives. On a console you join a party and the software correctly handles the cases around "do I want to put you in a voice chat channel for your game" (because it has to to pass certification). > File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypothetical issues? Really helpfully closed after 30 days of inactivity. https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/42 https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/42. (I didn't make this bug, but I found it, and just logged onto my xbox instead).
  - zeusk 5y ago
    PC games don’t need “cross play” FYI, you create a server and it is visible for anyone who purchased the game regardless of platform. I haven’t used in game voice for more than a decade now. discord, teamspeak, steam chat, Xbox live all work well and are used by quite a lot of people. Can’t comment on that single issue, but it does look like there was barely any information provided to repro the issue.