I might just go to my grave maintaining that this notion is incorrect these days. It really hasn't been true that PC's are vastly more expensive for years, nor that you have to go about upgrading them constantly.Originally Posted by Del Murder
I built my computer for about $1,000-1,100 about five years ago. That was with some parts which were pretty near top of the line, easily chewed through everything I threw at it during that time period, and with the exception of a new graphics card when the original died back in October, has had no real upgrading to speak of save adding another 1TB hard drive to it, which isn't really an issue since most people have at least one extra drive anyway, even if just external. And it's worth noting that the hardware I bought still vastly outclasses what's in a console today.
And I'd like to point out that I paid that for a fairly top of the line Core 2 Duo, top of the line graphics card, 8GB's of RAM, an exceptionally well built case, power supply, and a great quality motherboard. I could have easily built something with slightly lesser parts and saved a few hundred more dollars while still having a machine that would toss any current console on the ground and kick its teeth in.
When you consider most people who own a console are probably going to own a PC as well, the cost difference between buying a good PC which will last for years like mine, and buying a middle of the road PC and a console is negligible. Particularly if you buy the console closer to release. The reality is that a decent PC can last for years, and isn't as expensive as many people seem to either be convinced of or are trying to convince people of.
And it's worth noting that that graphics card I had which died lasted longer than my PS3 did, and I replaced it for not much more than it would have cost to have my out of warranty PS3 replaced. The difference being that in replacing my graphics card I got something which was quite powerful, and far more powerful than my old one. Not the current top of the line, but at about the price level where you start getting diminishing returns in the price to performance ratio.
Anyway, PC cost rant over. I agree with Pike on the idea of a Steam console. It would be kind of strange, yet completely awesome and probably would massively shake up the market.
That said, I don't see consoles going away despite them becoming more and more like PC's. While I may have just ranted about the cost of gaming on a PC being entirely overblown, he reality is that most people are idiots when it comes to buying PC's, let alone not doing stupid tit on them and ending up with 30 viruses from downloading a bunch of porn and clicking shady links in their emails and on websites. Consoles are simpler and give more of a feeling of stability, whereas the PC market is fairly divided amongst manufacturers, software, etc, and for those with no knowledge is a hell of a landscape to navigate.
Though I wouldn't be surprised to see more manufacturers probably trying to go the Nintendo route of cheaper consoles, smaller power jumps and lower development costs. It'd be awesome if we see them implementing better development kits and tools as well, though I'm not holding my breath. I think the Android box being talked about now may be a step in that direction. Let's face it, $600 launch prices are stupid, developers are having a hard time using the power these machines have anyway, and there's a years long growing period in working out the kinks in the whole process which just needs to be dialed back frankly. I kind of wonder how much opening up the machine a lot more might help that though, since I think a lot of problems in making development faster and more accessible likely lie in how closed off the development environments are.
As for me personally, I've gone through a rather seamless transition over the years from a largely console gamer in my youth with some PC games here and there to now playing almost nothing on consoles. There was a time when I'd be buying 20 games a year on consoles and playing them, now, aside from buying fewer games in general due to time and money constraints, a much smaller percentage of them are console games. In fact, since Christmas I think I bought 2 or 3 games on my PS3. On my PC I've bought easily 2-3 times that thanks in part to Steam sales, but honestly, there haven't been any other PS3 titles I wanted. The PC seems to be where all of the interesting stuff is happening for me these days.
As it is, I expect I'll probably skip the next console generation, or at least the first few years of it, which I've never done before.
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