God, these companies are all so evil and shitty in their own special way.
PS5 has 16 gigs of GDDR6. I have no idea how it compares to DDR5 price-wise when bought in bulk, but 16 gigs of DDR5 has gone up by like 150 dollars over the last 9 months or so.
Gaming kids have it rough. 😞
Makes it even worse that Sony keeps exclusives to their console. And reportedly reduced or stopped single player first party games on PC.
That’s some big bullshit there. The parts needed for the PS5 are already produced or planned/bought to fixed prices. So Sony just found an excuse to earn more money and hoping for customers to not realize it.
I doubt they have a contract for endless memory at X price forever. Memory and storage prices have gone up so much that the memory and storage of a PS5 has for sure risen 200+ dollars in price over the last 9 or 10 months if you buy them as separate modules as a consumer.
Cost of 2 TB SSD and 16 gigs of RAM (what you get in a PS5 Pro at 900 EUR once the price hike kicks in) if bought as a consumer, is about 450 EUR in my country. That’s without anything else (motherboard, CPU, GPU, power supply) that the device contains. Of course it has shared memory so perhaps you should be looking at 8 gigs of memory (still 100+ EUR) and an 8 gig graphics card of roughly equivalent TFLOPS since it’s kinda hard to put a value tag on the other features its’ GPU has - The RX 7600 starts at 300 EUR. So that’d be like 250+100+300 for storage + RAM + GPU. Still without a CPU, power supply, or any other electronics. Shit, the cheapest wi-fi 7 module I can find on sale in my country alone is 80 euros.
Worst part is, RAM and storage prices aren’t really even showing any signs of slowing down.
All things considered, I reckon they still have pretty low margins for their hardware compared to PC parts manufacturers. Which they can afford because they make it back on the game store margins.
RAM, HDDs, etc are magically not going up in price for them? You think they got some sort of deal that the much bigger manufacturers couldn’t negotiate somehow?
Have you any sorts of idea how that business works? How long before production you need to order such large quantities? And that especially because of this the client does not want to end up taking all the risks and demands steady pricing for a very long period?
Yeah. Thought so.
Back in my day console prices went down with time…
Consoles were also a lot simpler then. And we were finding lots of ways to reduce cost ( chip count reduction, etc) as technology evolved rapidly
Back then we didn’t have another bubble inflating prices every other year. :/
lol no thanks, next
I guess I’ll just have to buy even fewer consoles than I already am.
I know everyone expected prices to go up but $650 for a regular PS5? OOOFFFFF.
But it’s a whole console for the same price as 64GB memory, what a deal!
Great news for the steam machine. The price difference gets smaller as they raise closing the gap.
Thanks xbox for leaving the market to allow this.
Xbox hasn’t quite left the market, they’re just slowly sleepwalking down a pier. We’ll see if they wake up before they walk off the end and end up drowning. I’m certainly not holding my breath.
Xbox had already begun raising prices for the same reason Sony’s doing so now.
It is memory prices? Or is it just the “we don’t have any real competition” increase?
Memory. Xbox raised their prices already.
That could indicate a duopoly if the Xbox brand wasn’t struggling so hard.
Why do people buy a console instead of a PC? I just can’t understand, seriously.
Since the Sega MegaDrive, I’ve always been a console kid.
I don’t anymore, ps5 was my last and I barely use it. It wasn’t worth buying, but I use my ps4 incredibly heavily.
I used to do console because it was easier. You know a game put out for a system is compatible with your hardware. You don’t have to fiddle with things to get them to work properly, much less well.
It used to be a decent value proposition. It was worth it enough that I’ve had every non-handheld console for decades. The games would be sold cheap used, they always worked, and used consoles were cheap. If you stuck with the secondhand market you could get a system and like 20 games for the price of buying the system and one game of $50 value new. But you could also resell the games if needed for some reason. It was an investment, and it definitely paid off. My collections is worth almost 10 grand now, and I certainly didn’t spend half that much on it, when each game was $10 or less.
Those value propositions changed when physical media stopped being the main thing. Now used games sell for near what new ones do, because they just didn’t make that many. And why would they continue to make them when everyone downloads?
So now your question is valid, but it didn’t used to be in the same way.
Yeah, I think that the Series S not having a disc drive is really bad. I’ll probably want to replay most of the games I currently own in the future, but it’d be nice to have the option to resell the ones I won’t.
Same thing with the ps5, most of them aren’t disc systems, they chose that to kill the resale market. They chose to be glorified computers with drm and destroy the value proposition for any but people who don’t have the knowledge or desire to PC.
I have games I’ve never even played from ps2 era that I bought for $5 used that are worth hundreds now for whatever reason. It’s dumb, but that’s what collecting physical media does. And you can’t do that with files. You can try, but it doesn’t work.
because pc gaming is a huge pain in the ass.
console gaming is not.
some of us just want to play games. we don’t care about 120 fps bragging rights or spending hours resolving driver issues. console is superior experience for that.
Look, I won’t argue that console gaming is easier, but if you think you need to spend hours resolving driver issues on PC, you must not have owned one in a decade. I’m on Linux and playing Windows games without driver issues these days. On the dreaded nvidia drivers that everyone says are awful on Linux (they CAN have issues, but it’s not that common these days). On Windows there should be even fewer issues with gaming in particular since the games are actually made for that platform.
There are fewer and fewer reasons as time goes on, but the big one is that it’s usually a lower up-front cost (in a lot of cases, still is) and just works without any fuss. We might find the fuss on PC to be pretty minimal, but on console, it approaches 0. PCs have gotten easier to work with, people have become more literate in how to use them, and the long-term savings on PC with a significantly sized library have become more apparent, but there will always still be a market for something like a console, even if that means they abandon some of their defining traits in order to survive the future.
Yup. I wanted to play FF VII Rebirth, but apparently SE can’t be assed to optimize their flagship game for PC, so I stuck with the PS5 version because it just works. I don’t want to deal with stuttering and downloading weird drivers to get it to maybe not stutter. I don’t care about mods and ultimate graphics. I just want to play the game.
I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can’t be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.
what console exclusives for the PS5? it has 7. that’s it. only 7 that you can ONLY play on the PS5. (used to be 8 but Death Stranding 2 just came out on PC). and of those 7 maybe ONE of which is a console seller, maybe, and that’s Astro Bot and while it’s a good game I say that as a massive stretch that it’s worth a $650 point of entry.
the ps5 doesn’t have any exclusives that drive sales. none.
Mat Piscatella of Circana makes a good argument that they haven’t proven that. A lot of Xbox titles became all-time PS5 best-sellers immediately after getting ported. People who wanted to play those games could have bought an Xbox at any point to play them before the multiplatform strategy was announced, but they didn’t. He would argue that people have already settled into their platform of choice and just wait for the games they want to come there. Something like a third of all console players (at least Xbox/PS) are only playing multiplatform live service games on those consoles, not any of the marquis exclusives.
And to be honest, that makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t even that many exclusives anymore, compared to the deluge that there might have been in the 5th/6th gens.
This is a good point, but leaves Nintendo out of the consideration
And I don’t have data for this, because I’m not an analyst, and Piscatella shares what he shares, so all I’ve got are anecdotal observations.
- Some Nintendo properties have extremely strong moats, as Warren Buffet might call them. Pokemon, Mario, and Zelda especially. Even if a new property like Splatoon does well, it doesn’t mean it’s a system seller the way old exclusives used to be. The lower bound for this moat is clearly what the Wii U did in sales.
- Switch 1 was very popular with children, as the machine is cheaper and more durable than handheld PC equivalents. It was very easy to end up with multiple Switch 1s per household. The industry outside of mobile and Nintendo has done, from what I can tell, a horrendous job of catering to children compared to how it used to.
Speaking for myself, even if I wasn’t pissed off at how Nintendo operates as a company and decided not to be a customer of theirs anymore, they’re still running into the same problems that caused me to lose interest in PlayStation. They can’t put out enough exclusives to justify a $500 machine to play them, since I’m going to be playing everything else, at better settings, for the same or lower price, on PC.
Also I feel like Nintendo is losing its stranglehold on really good games in their own niche of wimsical platformers that are accessible and fun, but still provide some challenge if you seek it out.
See Astrobot. Hoping for more games in this same vein because its a winner.
I find it hard to argue with that as I also don’t have data one way or another.
I’ve personally decided that I’m not going to be purchasing any games on console that are available for PC. I was always a console gamer, from the (really dating myself here) Mattel Electronics IntelliVision to the PS5. But more and more they don’t feel worth it to me, and I’ve absolutely loved gaming on my Steam Deck.
Of course, Nintendo is almost certainly never going to bring their games to PC. I am a sucker for Zelda or Metroid, so I usually have a Nintendo console of some sort.
Of course, Nintendo is almost certainly never going to bring their games to PC. I am a sucker for Zelda or Metroid, so I usually have a Nintendo console of some sort.
There’s always emulators
Absolutely. Been there since Nesticle.
There are always a few games that I don’t want to wait for emulation to get right, and the majority of those are Nintendo’s
People who wanted to play those games could have bought an Xbox at any point to play them before the multiplatform strategy was announced,
But then they would have had to use an Xbox. 😋
Something like a third of all console players (at least Xbox/PS) are only playing multiplatform live service games on those consoles, not any of the marquis exclusives.
PC totally makes sense for them, if they can afford the min. requirements.
Because I like sitting down after a long day and playing games on my big ass oled tv.
I don’t like sitting down and turning on my computer so that it can update Windows, then the game itself needs to be updated. Then the game runs like shit because my graphics drivers updated to a newer version that doesn’t work well with the game I’m playing. So then I have to do some research to find the best driver version to downgrade to. So then I finally get the driver issue fixed and start the game, but now my controller isn’t working because the windows update broke the Logitech drivers my controller needs. So now it’s been two hours, I’m tired, I didn’t get to play any games, and I still have more work to do tomorrow to get things working.
Feels like linux can fix some of your problem, but then it creates some other. So, fair.
And it feels like the upcoming Steam Machine fit right into your case.
This comment. But now imagine not beeing computer literate. While consoles lost a bit of their appeal in ease of use the last two generation they’re still a nice little walled garden where most of the stuff is just working for you in the background.
I havent bought a current-gen console since the 360 for various reasons. But i get why somebody just wants a playstation and not a gaming pc.
I’d argue that they’ve gotten even easier to use, at least with Xboxes. The 360-ONE UI is dumbed down even further.
The cost of building a gaming PC has also gone up dramatically.
A whole ps5 is about the current price of just a decent “value” video card. Toss in your ram and storage and you’re looking at three times the price.
It’s a bit cheaper than pcs with similar performance, I believe. Some people have enough for a console, but not a decent pc. I’ve never had to buy a pc, so I’m not certain, but I think I’ve heard that before.
Simple, I can’t play Kirby Air Riders or Splatoon 3 on PC. And while I still prefer the form factor of Nintendo’s old smaller dedicated handhelds, I think the Switch (2) is still at least a little bit better at being a handheld than the much bulkier Steam Deck.
(Don’t say emulation, because even then I still can’t play online on official servers.)
The “bulk” of that Steam Deck compared to Switch 2 is what I’d call ergonomics. I was actually shocked that Nintendo didn’t reevaluate their joycon design more, because the Switch sucks to hold for long periods of time, and alternate joycons are one of the most prominent third party peripherals.
The third party joycons are essentially necessary because of how easily they break and get unplayable amounts of stick drift. I believe that I went through 3 sets of them (including the originals) in less than 3 years.
PS6 is going to be so boutique when that comes out. PS5’s cross gen period with the PS6 is going to be even longer than the PS4s with the PS5
It’s still ongoing. Might as well ask how long the cross gen period between PS4 and PS6 will last at this point.
Question; is it nowadays cheaper to just get a good gaming PC for long-term? (Including when someone does piracy related stuff).
Nowadays, I can’t recommend any console except the Steam Deck (OLED). I do always say “just get a good Gaming PC and for handheld the Steam Deck”.
Even without getting into piracy territory, yes. You need a subscription for online play on console, and there’s a lot of competition among PC stores to keep prices low during sales, including bundles of games. So for perhaps most use cases these days that involve some amount of online play and playing a certain number of games per year, PC ends up cheaper.
Don’t go all in with Steam. The people in charge right now are kinda old and the vultures are already circling.
All companies everywhere have old people. So don’t buy into any company!
Stupid comment
Well you shouldn’t buy into any company that can unilaterally remove access to all your games, but Valve’s kinda been a breath of fresh air in terms of how they treat their customers.
GOG’s the alternative if you want to keep your games forever, as they’re DRM free so you can just keep the installers. Even if they close down you’ll retain access as long as you kept a copy.
They still bring up a good point that you don’t necessarily own the games you buy on Steam.
Steam could “pull an Apple” and remotely delete games from the Steam library for licensing reasons or something similar.
The thing I do like though is that the hardware is not locked, it’s somewhat repairable meaning they can’t lock us in the Steam ecosystem even if management changes and wants Steam to become the Apple of gaming.
that you don’t necessarily own the games you buy on Steam.
That’s the case for nearly every storefront. Besides, there’s a lot of games on Steam that actually are DRM-free, it’s just not advertised.
They made a fifth one?
Again?
