Welcome everyone to a new series that will be starting here at Kralizec Gaming and it will be about the things console peasants like to say about consoles or computers that aren't necessarily true.
Today topic is the console peasants claim that console gaming is cheaper then gaming on a PC.
Usually their claim goes something like this: "Well, to play games on a PC you need to pay like a thousand dollars and if you want to play well, it's even more. Consoles are just cheaper you know"
And yeah, PC gamers, specially the proud ones, usually spend around 1500 - 2000 USD for their PCs. But you also need to remember, that these guys are the enthusiast. To put it in a perspective, you don't say that you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car, just because there are people who spend this amount of money on super-sports.
Let me now show that you can build a reasonable gaming PC for a very similar price as you can buy a console.
Motherboard: MSI Desktop Motherboard Intel H110 Chipset Socket H4 LGA-1151 H110M PRO-VD - 50 USD
CPU: Intel Quad Core CPU Processor i5-6500 - 170 USD
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 4gb 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2666 - **40 USD
Graphics-Card: Video graphics Card Inno3D NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti Gaming OC - 170 USD
PSU: CORSAIR VS Series VS400 (CP-9020117-NA) 400W ATX12V / EPS12V 80 PLUS Certified - 40 USD
HDD: Seagate Constellation ES 1TB Internal 7200RPM 3.5" - 35 USD
This puts you to a total of 465 USD giving about 40 dollars (depending on what deal you find that day) for a case, more ram or an SSD disk.
And you can go even cheaper if you go with used parts.
So let's compare this to the price of a PS4 Pro and an Xbox One X
PC - 500 USD | Playsation 4 Pro - 400 USD | Xbox One X 500 USD
So right now, you can see that you can get a decent gaming PC for a very similar price. But now the console peasants will start "Yeah, but for that price, the PC is much less powerfull then the consoles" and you know what. Here, I'm going to give it to them. Specially the new Xbox One X is a great value deal for the hardware you are getting.
But, there are a few other things you need to take into consideration. These days, most of gamers play games online. And while some people might claim they don't I'm gonna call that 80 %+ players do actually at least occasionally play online. And playing online comes with a subscription fee on the consoles, while it is free on the computer.
So let's assume the average life-span of a console or a PC will be about 4 - 5 years. On the PS you pay 60 USD for a yearly subscription. In four years, that add 240 dollars to the price of the console. For the Xbox, the yearly price is a bit better, 40 USD, so that adds another 160 dollars
PC - 500 USD | Playstation 4 Pro 660 USD | XBox One X - 640 USD
Suddenly the prices to look quite differently. And now you could pretty much get the equivalent power as you would get from the brand new generation of consoles for the same price.
And the last thing we need to take into consideration is the price of the games. While completely new games are pretty much priced the same, but for older games, PC, more specifically Steam and it's sales, like the one that is running right now, allows for incredible savings on games. Can't really quantify that, but if you are a patient buyer, you save hundreds of dollars yearly for sure.