this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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New report says PC games are outselling console games, calling PC gaming a 'bright spot' in a troubled industry (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 week ago by inclementimmigrant to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

People who say "it was never the case" are misremembering history.

Yes, consoles are sold at a loss initially. However, the price-to-performance ratio (in terms of frames per second) consistently decreases over time, regardless of what console manufacturers do.

For example, the original PlayStation was released in 1994 at a cost of $600. By the end of 1999, just six years later, you could emulate its games on a fairly inexpensive, older PC. In 1994, while the first Doom ran on a relatively costly i386/i486, it was impossible to match the arcade-quality graphics of PlayStation games like Tekken 1 to 3. However, by the time the PlayStation 2 was released, it became feasible to use an affordable older PC with a low to mid-range GPU to exceed the graphical capabilities of any console available at that time.

The only period when consoles were truly cheap—meaning they were sold at a loss—was during the first few months after their release. If you already owned a PC, you could easily surpass the performance of newly released consoles by simply upgrading your GPU.