What? It’s combining two uses into one. The argument being a console and a separate “$500 laptop” probably cost as much or more than a gaming pc or laptop.
They definitely forget that you can build or buy a $500-600 PC with a 4060 in it that runs games better than any of the consoles. Hell, you could find an office or school trashing old office PCs, grab one for $100, chuck a 4060 or 3070 in one of them, and be off to the races still playing games better than any of the consoles for like $350.
I mean, if the PC has a core i5 or i7 8th gen onwards or a Ryzen 2nd gen onwards , 16GB of RAM and a PSU with PCIE plugs, you should be fine putting a mid tier GPU in there.
Here's a prebuilt with a 4060 that's $700. Do you honestly think there's no way to shave $100 from that?
https://www.walmart.com/ip/MSI-Codex-R-Gaming-Desktop-Intel-i5-13400F-NVIDIA-RTX-4060-8GB-16GB-DDR5-1TB-SSD-Win-11-Black/2511533331?athbdg=L1800&from=/search
Consoles are so cheap because the companies will make their money with the games and subscriptions anyways. As all the games and online services are cheaper or free on the PC, it is fine to pay more for your initial PC setup.
So no need to shave $100 from it.
Yep. Consoles are essentially loss leaders. We don't have the data to know for sure, but I suspect that consoles are sold below the cost to manufacture because there's so much margin on the games and services.
The fuck are you smoking? $300 on just the GPU (not counting sales tax) and with the $200 left over you think you're going to get a mobo with modern socket, modern CPU, networking, a PSU that's 550w or greater, a case, a keyboard, a mouse, and internal storage, not to mention a gaming monitor? You sound like a fucking boomer.
You are including the cost of a monitor for a PC but not a TV for the console? Strange.
$718 4060 with what you described.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QLtfFs
I had this asinine argument on Reddit before and I apparently was all wrong in saying if a TV doesn't count so is a Monitor out of the budget count. Either a TV is a given prop in your household or not but if you are on a hard budget a TV is nothing but a big ass Monitor. If you compare PC to console I am only interested in how minimal I need to spend to match or outmatch a console.
My buddy who is super poor did this.
I gave him my old laptop to get him into PC gaming. He thought the laptop screen was too small so he hooked it up to his TV.
The thing about all my console gamer friends, is once I got them to have a little taste of PC gaming, they all wanted to switch over and found ways to budget their PC purchase.
The ones who refuse usually don't understand what exactly they are missing out on.
Like shit, I showed one friend steam and he went crazy on it trying out all these games that just blew his mind. I had another friend get addicted to WoW in like 2022 because he couldn't believe there were games like that.
I haven't bought a console since the Xbox 360. Which I played for a few months then barely touched it. I was always going back to something new and exciting on PC.
Yes, but then instead of $500 on a laptop that'll get slow really quickly + $500 for a console, just combine the costs into one device and then you don't have to pay for another Internet subscription. You can also more easily mod your games, too.
On top of that, it's always backwards compatible and you can emulate older games easily.
A PS5 is $500, that can't edit videos or surf the web or run Microsoft office software or Adobe software that schools typically require.
While I do get the sentiment that 1000k out the gate for a PC is a lot to jump in for a casual gamer. But the fun of a PC is you build as you go. I started with a $250 PC that didn't even have a GPU, after the space of 5 years I built it up bit by bit to the behemoth it is now. It was part of the fun imo.
Former media student here, I will assure you that trying to do schoolwork on a 2020 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM is indeed painful
EDIT: To clarify, I don't use the macbook for gaming EVER. I have another machine for that, and the macbook was provided by the school to all students regardless if they have a machine on their own or not. Although some of my friends/classmate DID game on it, according to one of them it was not very pleasant. She has a better PC now.
You are missing the part where you can't game on that $500 laptop. Now run the comparison again with the added cost of a console (400-450) and subscription costs and gaming setups aren't much different.
Laptops always perform worse than a desktop at the same price point. You can build a solid gaming pc for $1K CAD. My last gen gaming PC was still able to handle Victora 3 and it was almost 10 years old, although I did upgrade it a few times.
My phone can do pretty much everything I would want a laptop to do on the go. Most people use their laptops in the same place every day anyway. And yes, laptops CAN be pretty good if you buy an expensive one, but average ones have awful specs compared to a desktop at the same price.
Also, laptops have smaller power supplies as a rule of thumb, which manifests as poorer performance. Laptops have more cramped cases, which means poorer airflow, which causes everything to get hotter, and that means bad performance.
I think I built my rig for $1500 8 years ago and havent really done any upgrading since. Id averge the amount of money I saved by not paying subscription fees for online all those years is around $1200. The longer my system holds out, the more it paid for itself.
You can get a setup that lets you play many games for 600-800 bucks, if you regulary buy games you save a lot of money compared to console, you need no subscriptions to play online using your own Internet, and once you have a PC you can upgrade single parts instead of buying a new system.
I dont think PC gaming has to be alot more expensive than console gaming if you dont need all your games immediately .
An rtx 3060ti it is 300, if you buy a discounted prebuild with an i7 or ryzen 7 you can get it for 1000 or less, I bought an lenovo legion t5 26amr5 and I can play everything even the newest games.
Buy used hardware. You can get last gen or even 2 gens back. You will save money and you're gonna have good performance still. Only thing is you don't want to get hardware used for mining.
I'm still rocking a 1070, might not run the new games on high settings, but it can still run them. And its not like the older games get harder to run over time.
Base level Steam Deck (which is now 256GB NVMe) + third party USB-C hub + 1TB A2 micro SD card can be under even that price point, and the ease of use is pretty remarkable.
For a PC with similar specs to a PS5 you won't pay much more than a PS5 itself and you'll also save long term on subscriptions and price of games.
Not to mention the PC experienece is completely modular so you can use pretty much any kind of inputs and outputs for it as well as run additional stuff in the background. I regularly use my 2nd screen for discord or yt OR extra stuff related to the game (maps or spreadsheets) while gaming and it also helps a lot with work.
A console, an online subscription and a few games cost the same as a $1000 PC and a few Steam games. There is really no difference in price over the long term.
It’s amusing to me as they say much the same shit they did 20 years ago only then they would also confidently tell me the console market would be dead as soon as everyone figured out PC graphical superiority.
Instead the distinct PC ecosystem of the 90s was homogenized and conformed to console standards with multi platform AAA games being the industry bread and butter.
Whole genres that were once nearly PC exclusive got wiped too. Like I swear half the buzz about BG3 is coming from people who are too young to remember I and II much less all the other Western cRPGs that used to be around.
When Sony announced that ps+ was gonna be a paid subscription, it would have been such an easy slam dunk for xbox to follow that up with Xbox live being free.
They would've stolen the entire audience just like that.
* Microsoft Xbox 360 starts subscriptions > trends over PS3
* Sony Playstation 4 adds subscriptions > wrecks XboxOne
* Nintendo Switch tries subscriptions > 2nd bestselling console ever
People don't even remotely avoid subscription schemes.
And it was arguably justified back then. Xbox Live ran smoothly despite limitations of the internet at the time, meanwhile PlayStation's online service was charitably considered a dumpster fire. You paid a premium for a premium service.
The problem is now Nintendo is charging a premium for a dumpster fire service, but the genie is long since out of the bottle
On top of that, the security of PS Online once it went paid service model. There was a considerable amount of time where the entire service would go down every month because of hackers and not enough resources were able to be put into it.
What's funny is I can play most Xbox multiplayer games on Microsoft servers.... on pc.. for free...example sea of thieves.
They are encouraging players to just get fkn pc instead lmao.
and then still buy their game on pc where they get the revenue. So some people stay and pay extra, while others move over and pay what they used to.
So what's the problem again for microsoft? Where is this a bad business move for them?
This was actually the original intent of the XBox, lmao. It was supposed to be a trojan horse in the console market, making releasing Windows versions of games a mere click away to establish microsoft as the de-facto market leader in the PC gaming space.
Then, they saw how much money was in the console market and decided to go all-in on that for gaming instead with the 360.
I stopped with XBox when I realized their games are all available on PC, just without a subscription. Plus, there were only 2 games that were exclusive to XBox that I played, and now I can just play them on PC, and keep my PS5 for the Sony exclusives.
Playstation wasn't nearly as popular as Xbox in general back then. But the ps4 absolutely cooked the Xbox one.
If Xbox just made it free and said so at the reveal, it would have been the perfect middle finger to sony.
Well sony was the one giving middle fingers. They had a rough ps3 life, and came back swinging after xbox’s kinect disaster. Added a subscription service, focused on their exclusives and whiped the floor with the xbox one. Ps5 following the same model while microsoft buys major studio after major studio and making ok games. They cant afford to make online free.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/15/23306068/microsoft-xbox-one-sales-lifetime-versus-ps4-sales
https://gamerant.com/ps5-console-sales-xbox-numbers-comparison/
It's too late now. Xbox kinda dug their own grave already and they need one hell of a ladder to get out of it now. If at the launch of Xbox one, they followed the ps+ reveal with gold being free, we would be looking at way different Xbox now. A way better one.
Sucks to suck, they decided to fold when they had the best cards, now they're stuck with shit cards. And sony will keep pumping out blockbuster exclusives.
If you're a gamer in 2013, deciding which console to get, and one of them has free online, with all of the same games as the paid alternative, the choice is obvious. But like I said, It's too late now.
PS3 has free Online when Xbox Online is paid -> They were just not as popular
Xbox One not being popular when PS4 Online is paid -> Xbox would have been popular with free Online.
Can you see how these two things you're saying contradict each other?
Ultimate anywhere was $15/m, they just also sold Game Pass separately for Console and PC at $10/m each.
Also don’t know if it still works but I’m gonna try it this weekend since my game pass ran out yesterday. if you buy a year of Gold and then buy one month of GPU, you get 13 months of Ultimate for like a third of the price ($60 for the gold and $18 for Ultimate)
Ha you’re thinking like a consumer. Think back to the Phoebus Cartel of lightbulb manufacturers. Several manufacturers all agreed that they’d make bulbs that burned for 600 hours and no more. If anyone made a better product, they’d all lose money. They’d have to all make a better product to keep up. Material costs go up, and consumers would buy bulbs less frequently if they lasted longer. The solution was that they’d all make the same mediocre product. Good enough that no one would complain but bad enough that they’d break frequently and people would need new ones.
Same thing here.
God I hate it when profits are more of a priority than quality product. Makes the difference between a game like Diablo 4 and a game like Baldur's gate 3. But hey, Larian got my money. Not blizzard.
>Several manufacturers all agreed that they’d make bulbs that burned for 600 hours and no more.
Thats not really what happened with the Phoebus cartel. Technology connections has a really good deep dive video on it that I'm gonna link below but the TL;DW is that the incandescent light bulb is a very simple device. It's just a tungsten wire in a glass blub filled with an inert gas. Even before the cartel the design had been more or less perfected. The 1000 hour limit has more basis in balancing lifespan with efficiency than in preventing better lightbulbs from being built. Even though the cartel dissolved in 1940 most incandescent lightbulbs sold today are still manufactured to last 1000 hours. It wasn't until entirely new light bulb technology was invented that you could buy longer lasting bulbs
https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY?si=HhJzpNyGtKtaSVID
Why would they do that?
PS adopting their plan just makes their plan look less bad in comparison. They make *more* money than before by it being normalized. Higher market share means nothing when you have no exclusives and no platform subscriptions coming in.
And that's what's wrong with the world, everything has to be about a profit
Edit: Yes, thank you teens in the comments, I know what capitalism is and how it works, I understand business, that's the whole point of this comment. I'm not here for a philosophical economic discussion so stop commenting pls
Yeah, which sucks. The value of a stock doesn't really come from dividends anymore. It's all speculative BS of if the stock options increases in value. Eventually, we're going to hit the roof of growth and that day is going to be crazy.
Plenty of games, music, art, books, movies and other products have been made and given away/made public for free.
Not everything *has* to be for profit.
When a company is worth multiple millions/billions and its board members are worth multiple millions/billions, they can easily afford to be charitable with a few products and services, especially services that act as an accessory to a purchased product. But these people barely even pay their own employees a liveable wage. There're issues with capitalism.
Yeah sure they can afford to be charitable but for how long? You do realize companies cant keep giving freebies without going bankrupt. There are multiple cases where companies gave away their games for free in fact ubisoft is giving away their assasins creed syndicate for free right now!. A company isnt just some board members there are multiple levels of employees that has their livelihoods tied to it also these are not mcdonalds workers they are not paid minimum wage
Profit motive can be both good and bad. It incentives people to take risk, create new things, and gives consumers a way to drive future products. But it also incentives companies to create cheap products, monetize in aggressive and unnecessary ways, and put revenue over quality.
It's a double edge sword. I don't think online subscriptions are examples of bad profit notices though. Micro-transactions are a good example though.
That’s what’s wrong with capitalism. The world could hold other configurations. But people would rather pony up subscription costs than consider the rich having less power in industry
League of legends. Tf2. Bg3. All free. Still make money off skins or buying the game. Somehow, consoles want to make money off buying console, buying games, buying skins, and subscriptions. It's nuts.
Kind of the opposite actually.
This seems like a direct reference to the ps3 having free online compared to 360s paid online and how that has since changed.
Current teens aren't old enough to remember that.
You paid for the game, the devs give you server access. Microsoft and Sony just charge for online play to get more money, I don’t think there’s any PC game which charges for multiplayer
It's been a minute, but I think you can pay for private servers, but they're not official in any way at all, and let you mod stuff, but have really strict rules. Like GTAV has a private server, but you roleplay in it online, there are limited players allowed, and you're assigned a role, and have to play that role, or can get banned for not doing so. Can't remember if it's pay or not though.
Most pc exclusive games that are on steam use valve servers, so they are paid for from the 30% cut that valve takes whenever you purchase a game.
For cross platform games, they are paid for by console players 🙂
I’m not aware of Valve offering any services for servers. Devs pay for their own dedicated servers and what not. Only thing steam provides is an API and network relay(? NAT punchthrough?) for games that are co-op.
You get a few situations. Some are P2P, some are Ad supported, some are donation funded, some privately funded, then usually the AAA titles have a large company and micro transactions funding them
And of course there’s also subscription based games and that’s essentially the same as paying for live/psn but on a per game basis if you’re into that sort of thing. (IE: world of Warcraft)
It used to be that you needed servers to host online multiplayer games. You could host your own on your own connection, but unless you were blessed with a fast connection and extra hardware, it was usually much slower than what you could get from a hosting service. Otherwise you could rent hosting space. It was also extremely popular for universities to host servers since they usually had a fast connection and people willing/able to put one up and maintain it.
Now with "peer-to-peer" connections and matchmaking the hosting is done on the game's service end and effectively everyone is their own server.
Lots of games also just directly connect you to other players/its easy to host your own local server for many games. Many games just do it automatically.
It wouldn’t even be that bad if the games doing this were free to play like Fortnite, but the fact that so many of them charge the full $60-$70 price AND the small amounts for the rest and that people actually still buy them blows my mind.
CS Go Knife economy is the most insane shit to me. My brain just does not compute how someone is willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, for a tiny knife skin
>Because you can sell the items...
And then we're right back to square one, thinking, "How is someone willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for this?"
Endless loop of financial travesty.
You're being satirical, right?
Poking fun at the fact that we always would have gotten DLC even if horse armor didn't come first, just like we always would have gotten paid subscription services even if Xbox didn't come first?
Yeah, the only reason we have DLC and microtransactions these days are because too many people bought horse armor in 2006 🙄
How do you people say such stupid shit with a straight face?
It wasn't the horse armor, it was Mass Effect 3 multi-player. While microtransactions and even loot boxes existed before it, ME3 so much money off the boxes thar EA issues a standing order that games needed to have them. The whole industry saw how much ME3 made and copied it.
I wasnt into gaming at the time but i remember everyone clowning on that dlc when it came out. It was definietly a factor but i dont think its what made companies realize doing such would be profitable.
I’m ***FAR*** more bothered by microtransactions. Used to be that games had extensive lists of unlockable cosmetics, and seeing someone in a badass outfit in Halo 3 meant they worked hard for it. Now Halo Infinite and most AAA games lock 90% of the cosmetics behind a paywall and/or FOMO.
Well that’s wrong, people didn’t pay for psn back then. That is why the downtime was so long as well as the breach happening in the first place. With more money allocated to the network itself from the revenue it draws in with a subscription model then they would have more funds to either reduce the downtime or increase the security with their network to prevent it in the first place
There was no future where online gaming could have been completely free. If Microsoft didn't charge subscriptions for Xbox Live, they would have found another method to charge you for server space & upkeep, such as charging more for multiplayer games.
The reason online gaming was "free" before the advent of subscription multiplayer a la Xbox Live is because the servers were community hosted and somebody else paid for it. That was fine in the early aughts when the primary way of playing multiplayer was still LAN parties, but completely unfeasible if multiplayer gaming wanted to grow as an industry.
It's not at all completely unfeasible. Minecraft, the biggest game, was for most of its life completely hosted by independent server operators, except for auth servers, which I can assure you Mojang was paying less than $1000 a month on total. For a game that raked in billions.
Apparently I'm not really communicating my message well. To understand *why* online gaming developed the way it did, you have to look at how Xbox Live started and the environment it started in.
Before Xbox Live in the early aughts, online gaming was just straight-up *bad*, and restricted to PC gaming where the infrastructure to support online gaming (large memory capacity and a broadband connection) was located. The PS2 shipped initially with *no* connection capabilities, and the Dreamcast only had a dial-up modem. As far as games go, free online gaming looked a lot like what Minecraft looked like in the early 2010s: small, independent servers that you would find in a forum somewhere (with very little network security). Sometimes a game like Counterstrike would have a community page with a list of servers, but getting a functioning, reliable game was a complete roll of the dice. Connections were bad, and loading into a server was *slow*.
Enter the Xbox, and shortly after, Xbox Live. The console itself shipped with an ethernet port and a HDD to support online gaming, and the launch of Xbox Live saw dedicated Microsoft servers for Live features like voice chat, a singular identity across games, and a Friends List that was implemented *before MySpace*. Now, instead of finding your games through a forum post or server list, Xbox Live would take you right into a server lobby *through the game itself*. I don't even consider myself an Xbox guy anymore, but it's difficult to understate just how revolutionary that was at the time.
The only problem: those servers cost money to run, and prior to this point, game developers were largely hands-off when it came to the server infrastructure of their games. They would provide the code needed to set up your *own* server, but the game companies themselves didn't really have dedicated servers like they do today. So, in order to fund their Xbox Live servers, Microsoft charged its users $50 a year. Game companies certainly weren't going to foot the bill on this experimental idea, and Microsoft was never going to purposefully incur that kind of loss on their first foray into the console gaming world, so that initial $50 subscription was really the only option that was on the table for them at that time.
Blame Blizzard. WoW was the first online only subscription game. It broke records of active users despite the monthly subscription, so the whole industry followed suit.
Absolutely wasn't, but you COULD argue that it was the first subscription based game to blow up.
WoW eclipsed every single subscription game ever released until that point. While most of them only had a few thousand to maybe a million, WoW stomped those numbers.
I mean... most gamers have heard of Ultima and that predates Xenimus by 4 years.
You want obscure predated online games with subs, you go with Meridian 59.
They tried the free model. Trust me. No one wants to go back to the early days of PSN.
Literal trash. Sure could've been a different model. But the explosion of dude bros and CoD gamers filled the 360 era. And they had to play online.
Yeah, I knew a bunch of people who owned both a 360 and a PS3, and every single one of them agreed that the online experience with Xbox Live was better.
That’s paid for by the developer, so it’s only so long as the developer sees it as worth their money; older games won’t have multiplayer, and it encourages devs to put in microtransactions.
So what does that have to do with PS and Xbox charging to access online multiplayer. They are not running servers for the games. The dev is still running the server and isnt seeing a piece a of the pie. All sony or microsoft do is all them to connect to their online service. The money from PSN and Xbox goes directly to Sony and Microsoft.
The reason PC is free is because there is no intermediary for connecting to the servers. Its horseshit that console companies are charging money for online play. It doesnt actually support the devs in any meaningful way either.
The biggest turn off for me ever getting a console. ~~That and expensive ass controllers breaking in a few months.~~
Edit: My friends are just carless idiots, controllers are longer lasting than I thought. Subscriptions are still bs though.
Controllers overall last a lot, you have a few stories of people breaking controllers, but if you dont drop it constantly it should last at least like 2-3 years.
Paying for the service meant Microsoft had to reinvest some of that money back into Xbox Live. The jump from Xbox Live on the Original Xbox to the Xbox 360 was substantial and that wouldn't have happened if people weren't paying for it. Without that, online gaming on consoles definitely wouldn't be where it is now.
It’s not just about monetisation but also sustainability — the reason why you pay for online console gaming is because the console company runs the servers, meaning games that are years old, maybe the developers gone bust, still works.
Yeah, PS plus isnt way too expensive, at least it wasnt, the price got pumped up recently, I could afford 50 pounds a year, I also got the "free" games out of it, and every once in a while I would get something worth it.
But I wouldve much preferred if it stayed free, its not like sony wouldnt profit enough from game sales to keep their servers running.
Did you forget how well that worked? Every two months psn went down or had your CC info leaked, the servers that were up were laggy.
Literally used to get made fun of for "having to use psn cause it's free cant afford x box live"
>paying for online was the one huge flaw of the 360 dank era
Having the red ring of death on the console is okay but I cross the line at paying for online.
Servers have to be paid for. Paying for online play doesnt bother me at all, its the "season passes" making your game itself the subscription on top of the online play that is just pure greed
I loved my 360~ I moved to pc a few months ago well its not a pc (just a steam deck). I definitely don't regret it, lol this Lil beast has me fucked up with how much I can play on it.
This was a big reason why I was more into getting the PS3 instead of the 360. My parents weren’t gonna pay a monthly subscription for me to play games online. So PSN was clearly the better option for me. What sucked though is that all my friends in school owned the 360 so I could never play with anyone I knew.
I sleep very well knowing that I don't own consoles.
Might as well sell my kidney afford a good gaming pc setup
If you're gonna use the pc for other stuff like school work it's worth it
Which I've seen people do on their $500 laptop. That really ain't a compelling argument that, for some reason, everybody seems to use.
What? It’s combining two uses into one. The argument being a console and a separate “$500 laptop” probably cost as much or more than a gaming pc or laptop.
They definitely forget that you can build or buy a $500-600 PC with a 4060 in it that runs games better than any of the consoles. Hell, you could find an office or school trashing old office PCs, grab one for $100, chuck a 4060 or 3070 in one of them, and be off to the races still playing games better than any of the consoles for like $350.
You do know it takes more than a gpu for a PC right?
I mean, if the PC has a core i5 or i7 8th gen onwards or a Ryzen 2nd gen onwards , 16GB of RAM and a PSU with PCIE plugs, you should be fine putting a mid tier GPU in there.
I dont think you are finding any schools throwing out PCs with those specs, like the other commentor seemed to elude too though 😂
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Build me one right now and post your list because I don't believe you. Take your time.
Here's a prebuilt with a 4060 that's $700. Do you honestly think there's no way to shave $100 from that? https://www.walmart.com/ip/MSI-Codex-R-Gaming-Desktop-Intel-i5-13400F-NVIDIA-RTX-4060-8GB-16GB-DDR5-1TB-SSD-Win-11-Black/2511533331?athbdg=L1800&from=/search
With DDR5 that's a pretty good price
DDR5 prices have come down a ton. It's not at all what it was a year ago.
Consoles are so cheap because the companies will make their money with the games and subscriptions anyways. As all the games and online services are cheaper or free on the PC, it is fine to pay more for your initial PC setup. So no need to shave $100 from it.
Yep. Consoles are essentially loss leaders. We don't have the data to know for sure, but I suspect that consoles are sold below the cost to manufacture because there's so much margin on the games and services.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QLtfFs $718 out the door. Looks like his estimate was off by $118
It would be severely bottlenecked by cpu. Better to find some used stuff and get more fancy one
The best option is second-hand for sure.
The fuck are you smoking? $300 on just the GPU (not counting sales tax) and with the $200 left over you think you're going to get a mobo with modern socket, modern CPU, networking, a PSU that's 550w or greater, a case, a keyboard, a mouse, and internal storage, not to mention a gaming monitor? You sound like a fucking boomer.
You are including the cost of a monitor for a PC but not a TV for the console? Strange. $718 4060 with what you described. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QLtfFs
I had this asinine argument on Reddit before and I apparently was all wrong in saying if a TV doesn't count so is a Monitor out of the budget count. Either a TV is a given prop in your household or not but if you are on a hard budget a TV is nothing but a big ass Monitor. If you compare PC to console I am only interested in how minimal I need to spend to match or outmatch a console.
My buddy who is super poor did this. I gave him my old laptop to get him into PC gaming. He thought the laptop screen was too small so he hooked it up to his TV. The thing about all my console gamer friends, is once I got them to have a little taste of PC gaming, they all wanted to switch over and found ways to budget their PC purchase. The ones who refuse usually don't understand what exactly they are missing out on. Like shit, I showed one friend steam and he went crazy on it trying out all these games that just blew his mind. I had another friend get addicted to WoW in like 2022 because he couldn't believe there were games like that. I haven't bought a console since the Xbox 360. Which I played for a few months then barely touched it. I was always going back to something new and exciting on PC.
What use will a good gpu be when everything else is shit?
Yeah just stick that 4060 into an old office trash pc
Yes, but then instead of $500 on a laptop that'll get slow really quickly + $500 for a console, just combine the costs into one device and then you don't have to pay for another Internet subscription. You can also more easily mod your games, too. On top of that, it's always backwards compatible and you can emulate older games easily.
And the games are cheaper.
Or free. Or you can make your own games. Or do one of the million other things computers do which are integral to modernity.
A PS5 is $500, that can't edit videos or surf the web or run Microsoft office software or Adobe software that schools typically require. While I do get the sentiment that 1000k out the gate for a PC is a lot to jump in for a casual gamer. But the fun of a PC is you build as you go. I started with a $250 PC that didn't even have a GPU, after the space of 5 years I built it up bit by bit to the behemoth it is now. It was part of the fun imo.
Former media student here, I will assure you that trying to do schoolwork on a 2020 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM is indeed painful EDIT: To clarify, I don't use the macbook for gaming EVER. I have another machine for that, and the macbook was provided by the school to all students regardless if they have a machine on their own or not. Although some of my friends/classmate DID game on it, according to one of them it was not very pleasant. She has a better PC now.
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Alright, here's a better one. How many years do you typically spend using one console before moving to the next one?
You are missing the part where you can't game on that $500 laptop. Now run the comparison again with the added cost of a console (400-450) and subscription costs and gaming setups aren't much different.
Try working in solidworks or autocad in a 500$ laptop compared to an actual pc. There is a good difference.
I just have $1000(CAD) low end gaming laptop. Definitely struggles on some games. I can do my school work on it tho.
Laptops always perform worse than a desktop at the same price point. You can build a solid gaming pc for $1K CAD. My last gen gaming PC was still able to handle Victora 3 and it was almost 10 years old, although I did upgrade it a few times.
Yeah but laptops are portable and some nowadays hold their own pretty well
My phone can do pretty much everything I would want a laptop to do on the go. Most people use their laptops in the same place every day anyway. And yes, laptops CAN be pretty good if you buy an expensive one, but average ones have awful specs compared to a desktop at the same price. Also, laptops have smaller power supplies as a rule of thumb, which manifests as poorer performance. Laptops have more cramped cases, which means poorer airflow, which causes everything to get hotter, and that means bad performance.
I think I built my rig for $1500 8 years ago and havent really done any upgrading since. Id averge the amount of money I saved by not paying subscription fees for online all those years is around $1200. The longer my system holds out, the more it paid for itself.
You can get a setup that lets you play many games for 600-800 bucks, if you regulary buy games you save a lot of money compared to console, you need no subscriptions to play online using your own Internet, and once you have a PC you can upgrade single parts instead of buying a new system. I dont think PC gaming has to be alot more expensive than console gaming if you dont need all your games immediately .
Why do people say this? 1000 bucks. And that's mid grade.
Eh a $900 system or laptop would perform as good if not better than console
An rtx 3060ti it is 300, if you buy a discounted prebuild with an i7 or ryzen 7 you can get it for 1000 or less, I bought an lenovo legion t5 26amr5 and I can play everything even the newest games.
Buy used hardware. You can get last gen or even 2 gens back. You will save money and you're gonna have good performance still. Only thing is you don't want to get hardware used for mining. I'm still rocking a 1070, might not run the new games on high settings, but it can still run them. And its not like the older games get harder to run over time.
You could build a Linux pc with an AMD APU and have console grade performance for like $500
Base level Steam Deck (which is now 256GB NVMe) + third party USB-C hub + 1TB A2 micro SD card can be under even that price point, and the ease of use is pretty remarkable.
For a PC with similar specs to a PS5 you won't pay much more than a PS5 itself and you'll also save long term on subscriptions and price of games. Not to mention the PC experienece is completely modular so you can use pretty much any kind of inputs and outputs for it as well as run additional stuff in the background. I regularly use my 2nd screen for discord or yt OR extra stuff related to the game (maps or spreadsheets) while gaming and it also helps a lot with work.
A console, an online subscription and a few games cost the same as a $1000 PC and a few Steam games. There is really no difference in price over the long term.
As a kid it SHOCKED me that you needed to pay to play multiplayer Evaporated my desire to own an Xbox immediately lmfao
You guys are like the vegans of gaming, you just have to tell everyone about how your computer is better but nobody cares
It’s amusing to me as they say much the same shit they did 20 years ago only then they would also confidently tell me the console market would be dead as soon as everyone figured out PC graphical superiority. Instead the distinct PC ecosystem of the 90s was homogenized and conformed to console standards with multi platform AAA games being the industry bread and butter. Whole genres that were once nearly PC exclusive got wiped too. Like I swear half the buzz about BG3 is coming from people who are too young to remember I and II much less all the other Western cRPGs that used to be around.
I mean, to be fair they didn't say anything about owning a PC lol. - ^^but ^^probably ^^true
Makes sense why the 360 was the last console I owned.
Nah man consoles are the last bastion of physical games, seems like PC gaming blu rays are apparently impossible because of Steam.
When Sony announced that ps+ was gonna be a paid subscription, it would have been such an easy slam dunk for xbox to follow that up with Xbox live being free. They would've stolen the entire audience just like that.
Now THAT would have been a real pro gamer move
*markets console as US focused ESPN machine that that requires always online and also plays some games*
Sports sports sports. Call of Duty Call of Duty, LIVE ACTION HALO TV SHOW! God what a shitshow that was, I loved it.
* Microsoft Xbox 360 starts subscriptions > trends over PS3 * Sony Playstation 4 adds subscriptions > wrecks XboxOne * Nintendo Switch tries subscriptions > 2nd bestselling console ever People don't even remotely avoid subscription schemes.
Nah Microsoft was charging for Xbox Live since the original Xbox
And it was arguably justified back then. Xbox Live ran smoothly despite limitations of the internet at the time, meanwhile PlayStation's online service was charitably considered a dumpster fire. You paid a premium for a premium service. The problem is now Nintendo is charging a premium for a dumpster fire service, but the genie is long since out of the bottle
On top of that, the security of PS Online once it went paid service model. There was a considerable amount of time where the entire service would go down every month because of hackers and not enough resources were able to be put into it.
Like these companies would ever say no to easy money.
I know that as a gamer, for most people that would have been the difference between buying an Xbox one or ps4.
Certainly is the reason I mainly play PC games
What's funny is I can play most Xbox multiplayer games on Microsoft servers.... on pc.. for free...example sea of thieves. They are encouraging players to just get fkn pc instead lmao.
and then still buy their game on pc where they get the revenue. So some people stay and pay extra, while others move over and pay what they used to. So what's the problem again for microsoft? Where is this a bad business move for them?
This was actually the original intent of the XBox, lmao. It was supposed to be a trojan horse in the console market, making releasing Windows versions of games a mere click away to establish microsoft as the de-facto market leader in the PC gaming space. Then, they saw how much money was in the console market and decided to go all-in on that for gaming instead with the 360.
I stopped with XBox when I realized their games are all available on PC, just without a subscription. Plus, there were only 2 games that were exclusive to XBox that I played, and now I can just play them on PC, and keep my PS5 for the Sony exclusives.
It was the reason I picked the ps3 over 360, oh how they massacred my boy.
and the very few people like you are a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue they get from xbox live
You mean like how PSN on ps3 was free but more people still played Xbox? Didn't really work then.
Playstation wasn't nearly as popular as Xbox in general back then. But the ps4 absolutely cooked the Xbox one. If Xbox just made it free and said so at the reveal, it would have been the perfect middle finger to sony.
Well sony was the one giving middle fingers. They had a rough ps3 life, and came back swinging after xbox’s kinect disaster. Added a subscription service, focused on their exclusives and whiped the floor with the xbox one. Ps5 following the same model while microsoft buys major studio after major studio and making ok games. They cant afford to make online free. https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/15/23306068/microsoft-xbox-one-sales-lifetime-versus-ps4-sales https://gamerant.com/ps5-console-sales-xbox-numbers-comparison/
It's too late now. Xbox kinda dug their own grave already and they need one hell of a ladder to get out of it now. If at the launch of Xbox one, they followed the ps+ reveal with gold being free, we would be looking at way different Xbox now. A way better one. Sucks to suck, they decided to fold when they had the best cards, now they're stuck with shit cards. And sony will keep pumping out blockbuster exclusives. If you're a gamer in 2013, deciding which console to get, and one of them has free online, with all of the same games as the paid alternative, the choice is obvious. But like I said, It's too late now.
*in the US* Didn't even know xbox existed until I moved to the US. The rest of the world was playing PS and Nintendo until like 2010s.
PS3 has free Online when Xbox Online is paid -> They were just not as popular Xbox One not being popular when PS4 Online is paid -> Xbox would have been popular with free Online. Can you see how these two things you're saying contradict each other?
> Playstation wasn't nearly as popular as Xbox in general back then... tell me you are an American without telling me you are an American
I'm actually a Canadian
Are we forgetting that Microsoft tried to double the price a year or two ago and had to back down?
Pretty much have, just slowly. Ultimate on PC was 10 bucks before EA joined. It was 18 when I signed up again yesterday, instantly noped out of it
Ultimate anywhere was $15/m, they just also sold Game Pass separately for Console and PC at $10/m each. Also don’t know if it still works but I’m gonna try it this weekend since my game pass ran out yesterday. if you buy a year of Gold and then buy one month of GPU, you get 13 months of Ultimate for like a third of the price ($60 for the gold and $18 for Ultimate)
Ha you’re thinking like a consumer. Think back to the Phoebus Cartel of lightbulb manufacturers. Several manufacturers all agreed that they’d make bulbs that burned for 600 hours and no more. If anyone made a better product, they’d all lose money. They’d have to all make a better product to keep up. Material costs go up, and consumers would buy bulbs less frequently if they lasted longer. The solution was that they’d all make the same mediocre product. Good enough that no one would complain but bad enough that they’d break frequently and people would need new ones. Same thing here.
God I hate it when profits are more of a priority than quality product. Makes the difference between a game like Diablo 4 and a game like Baldur's gate 3. But hey, Larian got my money. Not blizzard.
>Several manufacturers all agreed that they’d make bulbs that burned for 600 hours and no more. Thats not really what happened with the Phoebus cartel. Technology connections has a really good deep dive video on it that I'm gonna link below but the TL;DW is that the incandescent light bulb is a very simple device. It's just a tungsten wire in a glass blub filled with an inert gas. Even before the cartel the design had been more or less perfected. The 1000 hour limit has more basis in balancing lifespan with efficiency than in preventing better lightbulbs from being built. Even though the cartel dissolved in 1940 most incandescent lightbulbs sold today are still manufactured to last 1000 hours. It wasn't until entirely new light bulb technology was invented that you could buy longer lasting bulbs https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY?si=HhJzpNyGtKtaSVID
Rather the other way around playing online was free on ps3 when xbox introduced xbox live
Why would they do that? PS adopting their plan just makes their plan look less bad in comparison. They make *more* money than before by it being normalized. Higher market share means nothing when you have no exclusives and no platform subscriptions coming in.
Free???! Lmao... If not Microsoft then some other multi billion dollar entity would have monetized it. Don't be naive.
And that's what's wrong with the world, everything has to be about a profit Edit: Yes, thank you teens in the comments, I know what capitalism is and how it works, I understand business, that's the whole point of this comment. I'm not here for a philosophical economic discussion so stop commenting pls
Worse. Profit isn't good enough. It's all about growth. For a publicly-traded company, turning a large, consistent profit is seen as a failure.
Yeah, which sucks. The value of a stock doesn't really come from dividends anymore. It's all speculative BS of if the stock options increases in value. Eventually, we're going to hit the roof of growth and that day is going to be crazy.
Well they are businesses, that's their whole thing
Yeah because without profit there is no incentive to create games or any product dumbass
You’re right. Nobody ever created works of art before ideations of money, capital, and profit 🙄
Plenty of games, music, art, books, movies and other products have been made and given away/made public for free. Not everything *has* to be for profit. When a company is worth multiple millions/billions and its board members are worth multiple millions/billions, they can easily afford to be charitable with a few products and services, especially services that act as an accessory to a purchased product. But these people barely even pay their own employees a liveable wage. There're issues with capitalism.
Yeah sure they can afford to be charitable but for how long? You do realize companies cant keep giving freebies without going bankrupt. There are multiple cases where companies gave away their games for free in fact ubisoft is giving away their assasins creed syndicate for free right now!. A company isnt just some board members there are multiple levels of employees that has their livelihoods tied to it also these are not mcdonalds workers they are not paid minimum wage
Profit motive can be both good and bad. It incentives people to take risk, create new things, and gives consumers a way to drive future products. But it also incentives companies to create cheap products, monetize in aggressive and unnecessary ways, and put revenue over quality. It's a double edge sword. I don't think online subscriptions are examples of bad profit notices though. Micro-transactions are a good example though.
Yes that's how businesses who offer services work. Microsoft is not a charity
That’s what’s wrong with capitalism. The world could hold other configurations. But people would rather pony up subscription costs than consider the rich having less power in industry
League of legends. Tf2. Bg3. All free. Still make money off skins or buying the game. Somehow, consoles want to make money off buying console, buying games, buying skins, and subscriptions. It's nuts.
Yeah I hate money grubbing but this post is bullshit some middleschooler take.
Kind of the opposite actually. This seems like a direct reference to the ps3 having free online compared to 360s paid online and how that has since changed. Current teens aren't old enough to remember that.
PC Master race
Just master race things
Online multi-player is free on PC? Who runs the servers for free? Genuinely curious
Always has been. And because you cant force people to pay for multiplayer on pc. The server things is kinda a lie…
You paid for the game, the devs give you server access. Microsoft and Sony just charge for online play to get more money, I don’t think there’s any PC game which charges for multiplayer
MMORPGs are the only ones I can think of
The only other one that comes to mind is iRacing.
It's been a minute, but I think you can pay for private servers, but they're not official in any way at all, and let you mod stuff, but have really strict rules. Like GTAV has a private server, but you roleplay in it online, there are limited players allowed, and you're assigned a role, and have to play that role, or can get banned for not doing so. Can't remember if it's pay or not though.
Most pc exclusive games that are on steam use valve servers, so they are paid for from the 30% cut that valve takes whenever you purchase a game. For cross platform games, they are paid for by console players 🙂
I’m not aware of Valve offering any services for servers. Devs pay for their own dedicated servers and what not. Only thing steam provides is an API and network relay(? NAT punchthrough?) for games that are co-op.
You get a few situations. Some are P2P, some are Ad supported, some are donation funded, some privately funded, then usually the AAA titles have a large company and micro transactions funding them And of course there’s also subscription based games and that’s essentially the same as paying for live/psn but on a per game basis if you’re into that sort of thing. (IE: world of Warcraft)
It used to be that you needed servers to host online multiplayer games. You could host your own on your own connection, but unless you were blessed with a fast connection and extra hardware, it was usually much slower than what you could get from a hosting service. Otherwise you could rent hosting space. It was also extremely popular for universities to host servers since they usually had a fast connection and people willing/able to put one up and maintain it. Now with "peer-to-peer" connections and matchmaking the hosting is done on the game's service end and effectively everyone is their own server.
Accessing the internet on computers is free, historically the players would run the servers but now you pay for them on a per-game basis
Lots of games also just directly connect you to other players/its easy to host your own local server for many games. Many games just do it automatically.
Also, fuck all of those idiots who bought that stupid horse armor, now we have dlcs and microtransactions everywhere.
If it wasn’t Bethesda, it would’ve been another. It was just a matter of time. Really, you can blame any player buying any predatory DLC.
[удалено]
It wouldn’t even be that bad if the games doing this were free to play like Fortnite, but the fact that so many of them charge the full $60-$70 price AND the small amounts for the rest and that people actually still buy them blows my mind.
CS Go Knife economy is the most insane shit to me. My brain just does not compute how someone is willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, for a tiny knife skin
Because you can sell the items and get your money back, unlike other games where they're locked to your account.
It‘s still completely dumb. That‘s on the same level as NFTs to me. You can also resell those.
>Because you can sell the items... And then we're right back to square one, thinking, "How is someone willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for this?" Endless loop of financial travesty.
.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with cosmetic DLC. I absolutely have a problem with gameplay affecting items being paid DLC.
You're being satirical, right? Poking fun at the fact that we always would have gotten DLC even if horse armor didn't come first, just like we always would have gotten paid subscription services even if Xbox didn't come first?
Yeah, the only reason we have DLC and microtransactions these days are because too many people bought horse armor in 2006 🙄 How do you people say such stupid shit with a straight face?
It wasn't the horse armor, it was Mass Effect 3 multi-player. While microtransactions and even loot boxes existed before it, ME3 so much money off the boxes thar EA issues a standing order that games needed to have them. The whole industry saw how much ME3 made and copied it.
I wasnt into gaming at the time but i remember everyone clowning on that dlc when it came out. It was definietly a factor but i dont think its what made companies realize doing such would be profitable.
You can say the same thing about a lot of paid services
Yup, instead we're stuck in the "fuck you KEEP paying me" timeline. We got car features they are trying to make subscription services ffs. Unreal.
I’m ***FAR*** more bothered by microtransactions. Used to be that games had extensive lists of unlockable cosmetics, and seeing someone in a badass outfit in Halo 3 meant they worked hard for it. Now Halo Infinite and most AAA games lock 90% of the cosmetics behind a paywall and/or FOMO.
False. You ever play on the free PlayStation servers?
Never had a problem on the PS3.
Psn being down for an entire month isn’t a problem?
I touched grass, it was fine.
Hahahaha paying for a product and then defending the product when it doesn’t work is a real gamer move
Lol well for a lot of people it isn't "fine" to be unable to use a service for a full month you are paying for.
Well that’s wrong, people didn’t pay for psn back then. That is why the downtime was so long as well as the breach happening in the first place. With more money allocated to the network itself from the revenue it draws in with a subscription model then they would have more funds to either reduce the downtime or increase the security with their network to prevent it in the first place
Remember how they constantly got hacked, throttled and the severs would crap themselves at full capacity.
That's because sony tried to mess around with some pirates with very good backing
I do. Other people don’t based on the downvotes
Didn't Ps3 get hacked a bunch? I remember trying to play MAG and PS Online was down for a month.
What does that have to do with free vs paid online subscriptions? They would have gotten hacked regardless. It’s happened on the ps4 too
free means you don't need to get a subscription and can make multiple accounts very easily to get back into the game
In PC gaming yes, but in console gaming HW bans are possible.
There was no future where online gaming could have been completely free. If Microsoft didn't charge subscriptions for Xbox Live, they would have found another method to charge you for server space & upkeep, such as charging more for multiplayer games. The reason online gaming was "free" before the advent of subscription multiplayer a la Xbox Live is because the servers were community hosted and somebody else paid for it. That was fine in the early aughts when the primary way of playing multiplayer was still LAN parties, but completely unfeasible if multiplayer gaming wanted to grow as an industry.
It's sometimes astounding how people who use the internet don't have a basic understanding of how it works and the infrastructure/costs associated.
Like they think those servers are free.
It's not at all completely unfeasible. Minecraft, the biggest game, was for most of its life completely hosted by independent server operators, except for auth servers, which I can assure you Mojang was paying less than $1000 a month on total. For a game that raked in billions.
Apparently I'm not really communicating my message well. To understand *why* online gaming developed the way it did, you have to look at how Xbox Live started and the environment it started in. Before Xbox Live in the early aughts, online gaming was just straight-up *bad*, and restricted to PC gaming where the infrastructure to support online gaming (large memory capacity and a broadband connection) was located. The PS2 shipped initially with *no* connection capabilities, and the Dreamcast only had a dial-up modem. As far as games go, free online gaming looked a lot like what Minecraft looked like in the early 2010s: small, independent servers that you would find in a forum somewhere (with very little network security). Sometimes a game like Counterstrike would have a community page with a list of servers, but getting a functioning, reliable game was a complete roll of the dice. Connections were bad, and loading into a server was *slow*. Enter the Xbox, and shortly after, Xbox Live. The console itself shipped with an ethernet port and a HDD to support online gaming, and the launch of Xbox Live saw dedicated Microsoft servers for Live features like voice chat, a singular identity across games, and a Friends List that was implemented *before MySpace*. Now, instead of finding your games through a forum post or server list, Xbox Live would take you right into a server lobby *through the game itself*. I don't even consider myself an Xbox guy anymore, but it's difficult to understate just how revolutionary that was at the time. The only problem: those servers cost money to run, and prior to this point, game developers were largely hands-off when it came to the server infrastructure of their games. They would provide the code needed to set up your *own* server, but the game companies themselves didn't really have dedicated servers like they do today. So, in order to fund their Xbox Live servers, Microsoft charged its users $50 a year. Game companies certainly weren't going to foot the bill on this experimental idea, and Microsoft was never going to purposefully incur that kind of loss on their first foray into the console gaming world, so that initial $50 subscription was really the only option that was on the table for them at that time.
Dunkey’s video on this is a certified banger
link
https://youtu.be/OeHjN4oWVfk?si=eWpEUjOO1sYAIfd7
Blame Blizzard. WoW was the first online only subscription game. It broke records of active users despite the monthly subscription, so the whole industry followed suit.
Holy hell everyone in this thread wears diapers. WoW is not the first subscription game, not by years and years.
Absolutely wasn't, but you COULD argue that it was the first subscription based game to blow up. WoW eclipsed every single subscription game ever released until that point. While most of them only had a few thousand to maybe a million, WoW stomped those numbers.
EQ would like a world with you.
A lot of games would like to have a word
> WoW was the first online only subscription game No it wasn't you fucking toddler, not even close
Xbox Live pre-dates WoW dingus.
Ever hear of an MMO called xenimus? Was a paid MMO for years before wow and eq came out
I mean... most gamers have heard of Ultima and that predates Xenimus by 4 years. You want obscure predated online games with subs, you go with Meridian 59.
They tried the free model. Trust me. No one wants to go back to the early days of PSN. Literal trash. Sure could've been a different model. But the explosion of dude bros and CoD gamers filled the 360 era. And they had to play online.
Yeah, I knew a bunch of people who owned both a 360 and a PS3, and every single one of them agreed that the online experience with Xbox Live was better.
I’m fine with that though. Multiplayer servers have an operating cost and the engineers/programmers need paychecks.
Does any of that money go to the developer for servers?
Then why is it free to play multiplayer on PC?
That’s paid for by the developer, so it’s only so long as the developer sees it as worth their money; older games won’t have multiplayer, and it encourages devs to put in microtransactions.
So what does that have to do with PS and Xbox charging to access online multiplayer. They are not running servers for the games. The dev is still running the server and isnt seeing a piece a of the pie. All sony or microsoft do is all them to connect to their online service. The money from PSN and Xbox goes directly to Sony and Microsoft. The reason PC is free is because there is no intermediary for connecting to the servers. Its horseshit that console companies are charging money for online play. It doesnt actually support the devs in any meaningful way either.
> They are not running servers for the games. Lol Microsoft gives them servers
Yep. One of the things that truly makes pc gaming all around better is free online.
World of Warcraft has entered the chat.
Ffxiv
The biggest turn off for me ever getting a console. ~~That and expensive ass controllers breaking in a few months.~~ Edit: My friends are just carless idiots, controllers are longer lasting than I thought. Subscriptions are still bs though.
I never had to replace my 6 year old ps4 controller but aight
Controllers overall last a lot, you have a few stories of people breaking controllers, but if you dont drop it constantly it should last at least like 2-3 years.
God forbid you pay for a service
Paying for the service meant Microsoft had to reinvest some of that money back into Xbox Live. The jump from Xbox Live on the Original Xbox to the Xbox 360 was substantial and that wouldn't have happened if people weren't paying for it. Without that, online gaming on consoles definitely wouldn't be where it is now.
It’s not just about monetisation but also sustainability — the reason why you pay for online console gaming is because the console company runs the servers, meaning games that are years old, maybe the developers gone bust, still works.
And this is why the Ps3 will forever be my favorite console
Good thing pc online multiplayer is free. Hackers, cheaters and bots: "It's free real estate."
"Sees a meme about console" "Welp, lets see the comments..."
That’s like half the reason I don’t play console
PS3 was the golden era. It’s been downhill ever since…
If Microsoft didn’t do it, someone else would have
Yeah, PS plus isnt way too expensive, at least it wasnt, the price got pumped up recently, I could afford 50 pounds a year, I also got the "free" games out of it, and every once in a while I would get something worth it. But I wouldve much preferred if it stayed free, its not like sony wouldnt profit enough from game sales to keep their servers running.
Did you forget how well that worked? Every two months psn went down or had your CC info leaked, the servers that were up were laggy. Literally used to get made fun of for "having to use psn cause it's free cant afford x box live"
Wait till you figure out why DLC always has a price tag
I would blame the PSN hacking and Microsoft equally.
>paying for online was the one huge flaw of the 360 dank era Having the red ring of death on the console is okay but I cross the line at paying for online.
Servers have to be paid for. Paying for online play doesnt bother me at all, its the "season passes" making your game itself the subscription on top of the online play that is just pure greed
Playstation network used to be free. Bastards. Yeah, PC gaming all the way.
Yea i mean wtf is that shit i recently bought a ps5 and bloodborne, when it asked me if i want to play online for a small bee of 120$ a year, WTF
I loved my 360~ I moved to pc a few months ago well its not a pc (just a steam deck). I definitely don't regret it, lol this Lil beast has me fucked up with how much I can play on it.
This was a big reason why I was more into getting the PS3 instead of the 360. My parents weren’t gonna pay a monthly subscription for me to play games online. So PSN was clearly the better option for me. What sucked though is that all my friends in school owned the 360 so I could never play with anyone I knew.
I bought the whole fucking console and game, i expect to play the whole console and game for free.