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!

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.

these are atypical times.

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.

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.

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.

Simple, I can't play Kirby Air Riders or Splatoon 3 on PC. And while I still prefer the form factor of Nintendo's old smaller dedicated handhelds, I think the Switch (2) is still at least a little bit better at being a handheld than the much bulkier Steam Deck.

(Don't say emulation, because even then I still can't play online on official servers.)

Can't speak for other people, but as a patient gamer it's a combination of cost and longevity - I can get about 15 years out of a console.

I only upgraded from an original xbox to an xbox 360 because I found it in a dumpster (I did have to fix it and buy a controller, so it wasn't ideal). My wife's PS4 is now 11 years old and still works.

It’s more cost efficient, and less of a headache to deal with anomalous problems like bugs and driver issues that can be as specific to your unique combination of PC hardware.

I recently bought RE Requiem and updated my graphics card drivers for it. They introduced a bug that would stop 2/3 of my GPUs fans from spinning at random. People who bought that game and played it on their PS5 didn’t have that problem.

Memory. Xbox raised their prices already.

I doubt they have a contract for endless memory at X price forever. Memory and storage prices have gone up so much that the memory and storage of a PS5 has for sure risen 200+ dollars in price over the last 9 or 10 months if you buy them as separate modules as a consumer.

Cost of 2 TB SSD and 16 gigs of RAM (what you get in a PS5 Pro at 900 EUR once the price hike kicks in) if bought as a consumer, is about 450 EUR in my country. That's without anything else (motherboard, CPU, GPU, power supply) that the device contains. Of course it has shared memory so perhaps you should be looking at 8 gigs of memory (still 100+ EUR) and an 8 gig graphics card of roughly equivalent TFLOPS since it's kinda hard to put a value tag on the other features its' GPU has - The RX 7600 starts at 300 EUR. So that'd be like 250+100+300 for storage + RAM + GPU. Still without a CPU, power supply, or any other electronics. Shit, the cheapest wi-fi 7 module I can find on sale in my country alone is 80 euros.

Worst part is, RAM and storage prices aren't really even showing any signs of slowing down.

All things considered, I reckon they still have pretty low margins for their hardware compared to PC parts manufacturers. Which they can afford because they make it back on the game store margins.

RAM, HDDs, etc are magically not going up in price for them? You think they got some sort of deal that the much bigger manufacturers couldn't negotiate somehow?

It's still ongoing. Might as well ask how long the cross gen period between PS4 and PS6 will last at this point.

It's the stand that comes with the console. I didn't notice them at first and was wondering why my ps5 was a bit unstable. Just a clear little clip thing that hides underneath.

I'm a PC gamer as much as the next person, but there's no real PS5 emulator and even the PS4 ones aren't very good yet, and that came out in 2013.

If you actually want to play PS exclusives past PS3 titles, you'll need to buy a PS.

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.