Fhqwhgod said:
inu-kun said:
Haven't watched the video yet, but from what's being said, aren't consoles far more consumer friendly the PC gaming? It's a single, not so big investment once every few (4-5) years rather then an extremely expensive one every 2-3 years. Require no technical knowledge and already optimized for the machine.
You are then paying way too much for your games after. Even if you have to play a game day one it will be a lot cheaper on PC. Of course if all you want is a neat almost PC you can connect to your TV to occasionally play a game and maybe use as a Netflix box a console is the cheaper option. But you may have to be okay with hardware upgrades every 3-4 years. Because this generation already was way behind when it released to be able to get to a 500$ pricepoint.
The days of every PC version of a game being cheaper on the PC than the console version, day 1, are long gone. If the games come from most large publishers, and are out on both the PC and consoles at the same time, they are the same price on both. The only recent exception to this is Overwatch, where the PC version for the non-super-delux-collector-whatever version is $40, while the console versions are $60. You may find storefronts online selling it cheaper day 1, but that is the specific storefront, not the publisher.
Back when PC gaming was seen as dying, yes, games often came out for the PC at the same time as their console counterparts for cheaper. But, not anymore. PC gaming is now bigger than console gaming, on the whole, again, so the publishers are keeping prices even.
The other thing about PCs is like what just happened to me. I built my PC in Feb. Put a GTX 980 Ti in it. Now, just a few months later, nVidia releases the 1080, with their "founders edition" being just slightly more than I paid for my 980 Ti hybrid card. There is always that chance that when someone finally decides to build a PC, that the components they put in it will be obsoleted within a short time frame; and, yes, with the price and power difference, the 1070 and 1080 have obsoleted the 970 and 980 cards-- there is literally no point in spending near the same amount of money for less powerful cards with a higher power consumption for new builds (unless the price for the 970 and 980s drops dramatically, but even then, you'd be better off with a 1070 or a 1080).
Granted, the PC market isn't moving as fast as it was in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it still can happen. By the time someone saves up the money for that system they want, they have to decide if they want (or in my case need, since I had been without a working computer for a while) that PC now, or if they can hold off a few months to see if one or more of their parts will be obsoleted by new hardware that is being released in the same price range. Still, I'm fine with my 980 Ti at least until the 1080 Ti is released, as it will do me just fine until then; but if I had a working computer when I bought this, I might have tried sitting on the money and waiting until I knew for sure if nVidia was releasing a new set of cards or not (it had been rumored for over a year and nothing had been showing up on either the nVidia or AMD side).
As to @inu-kun asking about investment and tech knowledge with PC vs consoles... sure, PCs can be a bigger up front cost, but, as I said, the PC hardware side of things has slowed down, dramatically. This isn't like the late 90s and early 2000s, where it seemed like every 6 months there was a new CPU with better speeds, and new GPU that was needed to run the newest games (like when DOOM 3 came out, or the infamous "but will it run Crysis?" days). Intel and AMD aren't looking for faster CPUs for the time being, instead focusing more on power consumption efficiency; so getting a decently fast CPU is going to last a while. RAM is cheap, I got 64GB of DDR4 RAM for my machine for like $450, which will last me for years with how current games and programs are. Even GPUs, with the release of the 10xx series and the new Radeon 480, aren't going to be huge issues for a few years as many games coming out over the next few years will still have minimum specs of a GTX 960 or equivalent (some as low as a 950), and even games like DOOM and The Division only have recommended specs of a GTX 970 or equivalent. It's going to be a while before the recommended specs start jumping to the new video cards.
So, my PC with a 6 core i7, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, and a GTX 980 Ti will last me a good many years (at least 5, if not more) for everything from web browsing, to gaming, to video editing. The
earliest I should even think about upgrading the majority of my system will probably be mid 2020.
And, as for the technical know how to put one together, they're not that hard to build. Everything is pretty much plug and play. However, if someone either feels they can't build the machine, or (like in my case) doesn't have the time to do it themselves, any local PC shop will most likely do it for them for a fee of between $150-$200. In my case, paying that fee as a convenience for not having to deal with cable management, etc. was worth it with my work schedule. I dropped it off, went to work, and they put it together, installed the OS, and tested it by the time I was done. Sure, it's an extra cost, but nothing is free.
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