Remember when consoles would get cheaper not more expensive over time!? This thing is five years old at this point.
The PS2 launched at £299. Got reduced to £199 the week the Xbox came out (and stuck the nails in the coffin just as it was being born) and finished somewhere around £79.
If only there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you left them.
This is also from a period of time where manufacturing genuinely got cheaper over time. Die sizes shrunk for the CPUs, so you could make the system smaller with less waste heat. There pretty much haven’t been those kinds of revisions for modern consoles
Makes it even worse that Sony keeps exclusives to their console. And reportedly reduced or stopped single player first party games on PC.
God, these companies are all so evil and shitty in their own special way.
I mean honestly I don’t think it’s the companies choice to raise the prices on this. When you look at the cost of the materials to make it and the fact that all the other companies have raised their costs unfortunately I think this is a massive side effect to that. I mean I’m still not going to buy it I didn’t want to buy it in the first place because it was already incredibly expensive and I’m definitely not buying it. I’ve been waiting for the price to drop on it and I’ve been seeing them sitting in Walmart unsold as they are with the current prices.
Back in my day console prices went down with time…
Same with RAM, HDD space, GPUs, Phones… Shit the whole tech industry really sucks today.
Its because they’ve already burned through all the good ideas and iterative designs have reached the point of diminishing returns. What’s something 2026 tech can do that six-year-old 2020 tech couldn’t? With the introduction of AI, a lot of tech has become objectively worse with no replacements in sight.
Back then we didn’t have another bubble inflating prices every other year. :/
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
Were consoles really simpler then? Seems like consoles today are just like PCs whereas decades ago they all had custom shit.
I was already not going to buy a Ps5, but now I’m $100 more not buying one instead!
So that’s $899.99. How is console gaming cheaper then PC again?
Uhhh, have you looked at pc prices recently?
I’m struggling to even find a PC that expensive.
Well for a start that’s the PS5 Pro and absolutely nobody is buying that.
That would be like me saying you can’t make a gaming PC without a 5090.
Because the equivalent graphics card is about $450, and you still need to buy a CPU, storage, RAM, PSU, and case. And it’s only the up-front cost that’s cheaper.
Premade desktops with a good enough you can still be found for shit 1200$ / 1000€.
And the savings from buying on Steam/GoG instead will probably make up the difference.
And you get a full PC as well
Gaming kids have it rough. 😞
My son is pretty lucky as I’m the only dad around with a Steam Deck and a Playstation 5.
He didn’t even have to ask for these as I’m the one gaming the most.
I guess none of his friends is gonna get a Steam Deck or a Playstation 5 soon with the prices or the availability of these things…
The only good part is that maybe people are gonna learn to enjoy what they already have and devs could learn to keep developing games for old hardware.
Yes I remember seeing that Sony is considering waiting until 2029 until PS6 because of the shortages and stuff going on and I’m thinking dude, I’m totally cool with that.
Gives it more time for them to really do a deep dive on optomization with the current gen and I’m here for it. I think them doing this is a sign that that will happen.
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.
if y’all are still buying consoles, you’re a big chud. stop giving billion dollar companies your pennies. emulators are free and everywhere! fuck off nintendo too!!
I’m a PC gamer as much as the next person, but there’s no real PS5 emulator and even the PS4 ones aren’t very good yet, and that came out in 2013.
If you actually want to play PS exclusives past PS3 titles, you’ll need to buy a PS.
Why do people buy a console instead of a PC? I just can’t understand, seriously.
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.
“…and just works without any fuss”
Unless you bought an Xbox One/Xbox One X and found out the software was total shit and you can find yourself forcing system software repairs and having video cut out issues on the One X. The amount of times I had to download a repair tool to a flashdrive for the Xbone is embarrassing even for Microslop.
Otherwise your statement is correct
I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can’t be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.
It’s funny how we never count the thousands of games you can only play on PC as exclusives. If we throw in emulators and backwards compatibility, there’s just absolutely no contest.
Not to say that there aren’t great exclusives for the consoles, just that the PC ones seem to always get ignored.
I think a lot of the conversation around exclusives comes from the standpoint of what keeps a console player from switching from one console to another (whether that’s a PC, a PS5, an Xbox, etc.), so PC exclusives don’t really factor into it because PC players are almost always a PC gamer plus a console player rather than somebody who is switching from a PC to a console.
That said, I think a lot of people in the industry (and console gamers) really underestimate the vastness of PC exclusives that exist thanks to the indie scene. Most people will think of PC exclusive genres like RTS games, but few people think of
BloodborneNightmare Kart or all the tiny indie RPG/horror/etc. projects that come out all the time as a reason to switch from a console.
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.
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.
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.
Analysts have been calling that this price increase would come to consoles too, and it’s already come for the Xbox. What firm do you work for that your data is telling you otherwise?
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.
