Back then we didn't have another bubble inflating prices every other year. :/

Same with RAM, HDD space, GPUs, Phones... Shit the whole tech industry really sucks today.

But it's a whole console for the same price as 64GB memory, what a deal!

Xbox hasn’t quite left the market, they’re just slowly sleepwalking down a pier. We’ll see if they wake up before they walk off the end and end up drowning. I’m certainly not holding my breath.

Xbox had already begun raising prices for the same reason Sony's doing so now.

The PS2 launched at £299. Got reduced to £199 the week the Xbox came out (and stuck the nails in the coffin just as it was being born) and finished somewhere around £79.

If only there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you left them.

PS5 has 16 gigs of GDDR6. I have no idea how it compares to DDR5 price-wise when bought in bulk, but 16 gigs of DDR5 has gone up by like 150 dollars over the last 9 months or so.

I mean honestly I don't think it's the companies choice to raise the prices on this. When you look at the cost of the materials to make it and the fact that all the other companies have raised their costs unfortunately I think this is a massive side effect to that. I mean I'm still not going to buy it I didn't want to buy it in the first place because it was already incredibly expensive and I'm definitely not buying it. I've been waiting for the price to drop on it and I've been seeing them sitting in Walmart unsold as they are with the current prices.

Uhhh, have you looked at pc prices recently?

Because the equivalent graphics card is about $450, and you still need to buy a CPU, storage, RAM, PSU, and case. And it's only the up-front cost that's cheaper.

Well for a start that's the PS5 Pro and absolutely nobody is buying that.

That would be like me saying you can't make a gaming PC without a 5090.

There are fewer and fewer reasons as time goes on, but the big one is that it's usually a lower up-front cost (in a lot of cases, still is) and just works without any fuss. We might find the fuss on PC to be pretty minimal, but on console, it approaches 0. PCs have gotten easier to work with, people have become more literate in how to use them, and the long-term savings on PC with a significantly sized library have become more apparent, but there will always still be a market for something like a console, even if that means they abandon some of their defining traits in order to survive the future.

I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can't be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.

because pc gaming is a huge pain in the ass.

console gaming is not.

some of us just want to play games. we don't care about 120 fps bragging rights or spending hours resolving driver issues. console is superior experience for that.

It's a bit cheaper than pcs with similar performance, I believe. Some people have enough for a console, but not a decent pc. I've never had to buy a pc, so I'm not certain, but I think I've heard that before.

The cost of building a gaming PC has also gone up dramatically.

A whole ps5 is about the current price of just a decent "value" video card. Toss in your ram and storage and you're looking at three times the price.

Because I like sitting down after a long day and playing games on my big ass oled tv.

I don't like sitting down and turning on my computer so that it can update Windows, then the game itself needs to be updated. Then the game runs like shit because my graphics drivers updated to a newer version that doesn't work well with the game I'm playing. So then I have to do some research to find the best driver version to downgrade to. So then I finally get the driver issue fixed and start the game, but now my controller isn't working because the windows update broke the Logitech drivers my controller needs. So now it's been two hours, I'm tired, I didn't get to play any games, and I still have more work to do tomorrow to get things working.

Memory. Xbox raised their prices already.

Even without getting into piracy territory, yes. You need a subscription for online play on console, and there's a lot of competition among PC stores to keep prices low during sales, including bundles of games. So for perhaps most use cases these days that involve some amount of online play and playing a certain number of games per year, PC ends up cheaper.

My son is pretty lucky as I’m the only dad around with a Steam Deck and a Playstation 5.

He didn’t even have to ask for these as I’m the one gaming the most.

I guess none of his friends is gonna get a Steam Deck or a Playstation 5 soon with the prices or the availability of these things..

The only good part is that maybe people are gonna learn to enjoy what they already have and devs could learn to keep developing games for old hardware.