"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.
But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."
I mean, for the price of a mid range graphics card I can still buy a whole console. GPU prices are ridiculous. Never mind everything else on top of that.
Yeah, GPU prices are kinda ridiculous, but a 7600 is probably good enough to match console quality (essentially the same as the 6650XT, so get whatever is cheaper), and I see those going for $330. It should be more like $250, so maybe you can find it closer to that amount when there’s a sale. Add $500-600 for mobo, CPU, PSU, RAM storage, and a crappy case, and you have a decent gaming rig. Maybe I’m short by $100 or so, but that should be somewhere in the ballpark.
So $900-1000 for a PC. That’s about double a console, extra if you need keyboard, monitor, etc. Let’s say that’s $500. So now we’re 3x a console.
Entry cost is certainly higher, so what do you get in return?
Depending on how many and what types of games you play, it may or may not be cheaper. I play a ton of indies and rarely play AAA new releases, so a console would be a lot more expensive for me. I also have hundreds of games, and probably play 40 or so in a given year (last year was 50 IIRC). If I save just $10 per game, it would be the same price as a console after 2 years, but I save far more since I wait for sales. Also, I’ll have a PC anyway, so technically I should only count the extra stuff I buy for playing games, as in my GPU.
GPU prices are ridiculous, but those GPUs are also ridiculously more powerful than anything in any console.
The rough equivalent to a PS5Pro’s GPU component is a … not current gen, not last gen, but the gen before that… find AMD’s weakest GPU model in the 6 series, the RX 6600, and that is roughly the same performance as the GPU performance of a PS5Pro.
The Switch 2 may have an interesting, custom mobile grade Nvidia APU, but at this point, its not out yet, no benchmarks, etc.
Oh right also: If GPU prices for PCs remain elevated… well, any future consoles will also have elevated prices. Perhaps not to the same degree, but again, that will be because a console will be basically fairly low tier if you compared it to the range of PC hardware… and console mfgs can subsidize console costs with game sales… and they get discounts on ordering the components that go into their consoles by ordering in huge bulk volumes.