$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
I know it’s not an option for consoles. Since the 7th gen, it was always moving in this direction. It’s probably one of dozens of reasons that PC overtook consoles in market share.
were basically at the point on the timeline where PC and Mobile basically kills consoles.
We’ve been there basically since the PS4/XBONE made it clear the focus was on common architectures and software toolchains so that the majority of games could be multiplatform by default.
The issue is what it always has been. People are afraid of managing drivers and software and likely have horror stories about Windows and hate the average Linux evangelist with a passion. Whereas consoles “just work”
And price wise? A good gaming PC that will last you a generation or two tends to cost about what a console+refresh SKU does. AND you generally want to wait until a few years after the start of a console generation to buy that GPU (time blurs but I want to say RTX was the big thing when the PS5 launched and now it is upscaling). Which makes it even harder to sell because you are telling people to save up even more AND to wait.
Much like “The year of Linux gaming”, it is the kind of thing that some people claim is constantly happening and the rest of us acknowledge is unlikely to ever happen en masse.
the difference is at least you can see it in more real time numbers. Xbox is clearly a dying brand, which leaves Sonys home console sales for now (~60M) and the switch as a handheld device. Devs are already starting to port everything on PC, and 1st party game development rate has gone down a lot. 3rd party devs are also starting to abandon console exclusively/timed exclusively over time (capcom making the next monster hunter simul release on pc instead of a year and a half cadence, square enix backtracking on making final fantasy a timed exclusive due to not enough sales)
Japan is completely flipping its old image of PC being the device for porn addicts of years past and starting to heavily buy into pc too, which is why Valve went to attend Tokyo gameshow to pitch the steamdeck for japanese handheld players(which remain the majority of console purchases in japan)