warm

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.