The win is in vain if you can't buy PC hardware either.

Yes you can it's just now comparable in cost to a flagship console

Play box, x-station 400, who cares

Yeah, those games are by far the minority.

There are still many thousands of games playable on older hardware.

You've missed the point. Any computer can run games from Valve. Why buy a stupid expensive console when you've already got everything you need? This is why Sony and Microsoft are losing sales.

Yeah I’m almost certain it’s gonna come back in a big way.

The question is will it be something permanent, in such case the PS5 would become a real Steam Machine alternative. Or will it just become something that you have to reinstall every time you reboot the console, becoming just a gimmick..

Fair enough, you really aren’t spending much more, if any at all, on microcenter prebuilts if you’re lucky enough to have one close. There are tons of resources for learning, but if your time is worth more than the hundred bucks or so and you don’t care about customizing it to your needs, wants, or preferences, that’s totally understandable.

But yeah, tough time to get/build a gaming pc. Imo there are a few different strategies to deal with the crazy prices.

1. suck it up pay whatever it is to get what you want.
2. get a good base platform and skimp on some components that can be easily upgraded later.
3. get an old relatively dirt cheap system as a stopgap. Office pc + gpu? Gaming laptop with broken screen? But probably won’t have much resale value when/if prices do come down

Personally if I didn’t already have a pc and old parts laying around I’d go with #2. Get a case I like, decent mobo, cpu, psu. And I’d get a used couple generation old gpu, and absolute minimum viable amount of ram and storage until prices come down. Or I get a raise lol

Currently my desktop is a ryzen 7 1700 and Radeon 5700. It’s getting pretty old now, and if prices weren’t insane I’d have upgraded by now. But tbh, it’s fine. I don’t really care about playing the latest AAA games, and all the games I am interested in playing run absolutely fine at 1440p. So for the time being, it’s fine. I could upgrade the cpu pretty massively for not much money, but eh I’m really not bothered enough to do that until I get a new gpu. But a modest gpu upgrade is a ton of money, so not quite worth it to me yet.

Edit: oh and yeah if you do just grab a prebuilt, you will probably want at least a 9060xt or 5060ti for the gpu if you want to play like brand new AAA games at 1440p and high-ish settings

The original point was sales. I do agree with your point of view though. I just need to build a gaming computer for each gamer in the house. Six computers at today's prices.... Nevermind! I guess we are sticking with what we got for now.

We shall see!

Hell if I know, I don't look at PC prices when they're this high.

I was actually thinking quite out of date actually. Also the thrift store near me tends to have piss cheap laptops cause they are locked or have wipped drives. But even if it's say 16 years old you could still play Kotor, Republic Cammandos, every Fallout up until 4, Dragon Age Origins, and plenty more modern no but good absolutely.

FAFO

Maybe most people who would want to buy said systems can't afford 1600 dollars for one when they can't even afford groceries and gas? Huh, just maybe.

(Used pricing from GameStop)

I would probably see if factorio can run on it. Rimworld too.

I have literally bought the last few brand new, 2026 PS5 games on disc. I'm getting Control Resonant this week on disc.

If you mean GTAVI, then yeah that's bonkers. But you can get most games with a physical disc currently.

Nah, that guy is a bit off. I've bought several brand new, 2026 titles this year and they all have discs in the box.

"Computers that are just for games, that you can't do anything else on... And we say what games, and also for lots of them you have to keep paying us to play them... And you can't have any physical ownership of them anymore".

Sounds like it's gotten better? I remember it being a shit show before I sold my ps5.

I hardly ever use my Sony Netflix box anymore.

Mostly because I stopped buying from them digitally because they won't refund a game if you've downloaded a single solitary bit of data, and now they won't sell physical copies so...

And the PC master race wins the blood war

Our experiences may just have been a bit different and we got different games, but all of my physical boxes have a disc in them that I can remember.

I actually went back to buying discs this year because my brother lives close by now and we can share the games. Thankfully that's still an option.

Modded? No. Unmodded? Maybe. I used to run an ultra modded NV save on a shitty laptop from 2010.

Yeah sharing discs is one of the few benefits of console, I was pissed when most of the games I bought were redemption codes. I'll never buy another console again after the accelerated enshittification of the companies who own them.

I wonder how gta will affect those numbers, and how those numbers will affect the pc release.

i appreciate the write up buddy, i’ve been very inclined but yeah this may be the worst time ever to get into pc building… i’ll keep my eyes peeled for a micro center deal if there’s a good one, saw a 9060xt pre built in the realm of 1300 usd. not sure if that’s really good bang for my buck, im also thinking of getting a bundle and perhaps a single fan nvidia gpu, and other parts. i’ve got an SSD lying in my ps5 i can always take out to save some easy cash on the full cost of the build.

hahaha that’s fair, looking at it has made me question my choices

1. Get a gaming pc like everybody else
2. ???
3. Profit

Well did you?

I can get a fairly good gaming PC for a thousand dollars why would I pay $900 for a games console that's basically worse in every way?

I doubt it will have a huge impact. It's not as if we're at the beginning of the console generation most people will already have a PlayStation.

Well it depends on the mods, for both games lightly modded should be fine. Throwing in 100s might be a problem though.

Then again, 1.7 for Rimworld is apparently improving performance by quite a bit. So 2-4 times as many mods?

I thought a hundred plus mods was lightly modded Rimworld? The game is supposed to take over twenty minutes to launch right?

Yeah it was a good time

To be fair, most of your complaint is about the hardware of a low-power device not being able to handle rendering double the game and then compensating accordingly.

Which is an expected outcome.

The game is advertised and sold as having split screen co-op. Having to mess with console settings to get it to work and the resulting experience being shit isn't excusable. Of course I didn't expect a full PC equivalent but I expected it to have a minimum of polish and optimization.

If they couldn't make the game do split screen decently, they shouldn't put that as a feature. If the game can't be run decently in single player, they shouldn't have sold it at all.

Console players living in a world of only triple A games. Have yet to discover that 20$ games from indie developers are thousand times better