Console companies making big PC push

[Swami]

I read Sony will be making a big push to PC gaming. Since console companies lose a lot of money on the console itself, would it benefit them to migrate heavily to PC or would pirating be too much of a concern? Is it a problem for Steam?

[zzip]

The console itself tends to be a break-even or loss.   But they make a lot of money from the ecosystem.   They get a cut of every third party game sold for their system, they make money from subscriptions like PS+

 

So the bigger their ecosystem is, the more profitable it is.   Sony sells consoles on the strength of their exclusives.   So I see the decision to put more and more of their exclusives on PC to be risky for them in the long-term.  Granted so far they don't come to PC until after they'd been out on playstation for a bit,  except for MLB The show, which was on PC day one this year.   But apparently that's due to contractual reasons with MLB.

 

Still though,  there will likely be PC gamers who decide not to buy playstions because the games will come to PC eventually

[Tanooki]

I've seen that and can't wait until Sony jumps on board with their 1st/2nd party entries like MS did a long time ago.  Third parties saw the logic in testing the waters as far back really as later PS2 definitely since PS3 period, and it has had a lot of benefit.  You get this really well done service through Steam(etc) where you can mitigate a lot of overhead having them distro it, digitally only, and you get the best version of the game because you don't have the more meager limitations a budgeted out console has to contend with.  Combine that with the wide spread use of the PC, the rotating ok to deep sales that come around, and the fact that the MS pads since the 360 have been PC standard makes it an easy decision.  I've got a few console games for the PC and they are better than what my PS3 at the time would have done and very obviously so too.  Yes there is the overhead of a new computer, mostly really, the stupid video card expense these days due to wanker coin miners, but still it pays off in the end.

 

Sure you may be into a PC at 1500~ for a good card and setup vs a $500 console, but that gap will get made up in decent time over a few years.  As steam gets all these better optimized console games released they start usually with 20% off sales, but it takes not very long to hit that 50% mark or deeper a quarter or two down the road.  That game that's still $60 at retail will be $15-30 on PC, and it's not stuck on a console walled garden either as the PC stuff stays updated by steam/developers and rolls to next generation hardware for compatibility sake.  When you're saving $30-45 a game, it adds up over and over, plus the added utility of what a PC does too factors in as well.

The PC has by far the largest ecosystem and one that doesn't have a ticking death clock towards new hardware and new investment because a 10-15 year old PC can run solid PS3 era style games excellently, my 6 1/2 year old PC rocks out PS4 Pro level stuff better than the console can too.  It makes most sense and shows it, which is why third parties jumped on board years back, then MS did since they control the whole PC-Windows environment anyway, Sony is just last to get on board.  Once they do I can think of a game or two I'd pick up once/if they're converted that right now they won't get money for.

[Keatah]

As far as the stupid wanker coin minerz. I hear that Nvidia is making it so eternium minerz can't use their cards anymore. Not unless they buy a miner's edition or the compute version or something. MM-hmm..

[zzip]

15 hours ago, Tanooki said:

and you get the best version of the game because you don't have the more meager limitations a budgeted out console has to contend with.

It doesn't always work out that way in practice though,  the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn for instance was riddled with issues that the console version wasn't

https://guides.gamepressure.com/horizon_zero_dawn/guide.asp?ID=55222

 

In a console you only have one hardware spec to code for.   With PC you have to worry about multiple chipsets, multiple drivers,  multiple hardware configurations which create a QA problem where you can't possibly test every possible PC configuration that's out there.

 

There was a time when I was a PC-only gamer, but I got fed up with these kinds of issues constantly.  Now I have a PC, PS5 and Switch.

15 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Sure you may be into a PC at 1500~ for a good card and setup vs a $500 console, but that gap will get made up in decent time over a few years.  As steam gets all these better optimized console games released they start usually with 20% off sales, but it takes not very long to hit that 50% mark or deeper a quarter or two down the road.  That game that's still $60 at retail will be $15-30 on PC, and it's not stuck on a console walled garden either as the PC stuff stays updated by steam/developers and rolls to next generation hardware for compatibility sake.  When you're saving $30-45 a game, it adds up over and over, plus the added utility of what a PC does too factors in as well.

When I'm interested in a game,  I routinely check prices on Steam/GoG/Playstation and Nintendo to see where I can get the best deal.   The idea that Steam gets better deals is nonsense.   They get the same sale prices that GoG and Playstation do.   They may not go on sale in the same week.   Most older Sony games will retail for $20, many older big name games such as GTA V, Witcher 3, EA games, and many others can routinely be found for $15 or even less during a sale.

 

And then there's all the free games.  Buy a PS5, you get 20 games for free, including Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, God of War, Days Gone, Resident Evil 7,  that's in addition to all the free games they gave out in the Play at Home initiative in response to COVID.

 

And the games get updated on console as well.   Many PS4 games have PS5 updates-  higher resolution with better textures and/or better framerates, HDR improvements, etc.

 

So no, you aren't going to save enough money in software to justify the greater cost in hardware.  That's a lie PC gamers tell themselves to justify the cost.   The real reason people pay the costs is for bragging rights.  That's why so many will spend $1000 on a GPU rather than a perfectly suitable $300 GPU,  then run side-by-side comparisons where they have to pause the video and magnify a section of a screen to find a slightly better texture and claim the difference is MASSIVE!   They are trying to justify spending so much.

 

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

As far as the stupid wanker coin minerz. I hear that Nvidia is making it so eternium minerz can't use their cards anymore. Not unless they buy a miner's edition or the compute version or something. MM-hmm..

Sounds like a scam so they can charge a premium for the Miner's edition.   I doubt it help shortages because the financial incentive to produce more of the higher priced cards.

[Tanooki]

I'm aware that consoles are a catch all, while PC has a lot of parts to not line up with the next guy.  Stuff happens, but it can be repaired and is worth it in the larger picture of things not being stuck.

 

I used to be just a console gamer for over a decade pretty much fed up with keeping up in the late 90s into much of the 00s.  Asinine bugs, stupid updates, firmware pushes, crap being released that doesn't work out of the box to then be tied down to a slow download with massive patches sucking up the entire thing since they can't multi-task.  Then the concern if servers changing/going offline, things just being broken entirely with no way out in the long term, so I went back to PC.  Even if there are similar problems, you're not system bound, it'll work far more years later.

 

I guess we'll just disagree on PC(Steam, GoG, other keys tied back to them) not having the better deals.  And free, so what, 20 whole games.  It's not hard to get a roll out of free games on PC too and I don't mean warez, far more, considering the amount of free projects out there (itch.io, etc) or rotated out gimmes GoG, Steam, etc do as well.  Just because they gave out some one time big name gems because of the virus that's not normal.

 

I'd never drop a grand on a GPU, I know some twits will but it's insane.  I think the 980 when I got it was around $500, but it has lasted me this long, longer than a console lifetime and outdid the PS3 that was kicking when I got it and the PS4-Pro it kept up with as well.  I can image the $1000 card just being utterly wasteful.

 

 

I have to admit, curious about the nvidia miners card.  It would be amusing if nvidia could find some way to lock out mining from being used on anything but those cards, serve the jerks right for jamming up the costs of cards for what they're really intended for.

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I used to be just a console gamer for over a decade pretty much fed up with keeping up in the late 90s into much of the 00s.  Asinine bugs, stupid updates, firmware pushes, crap being released that doesn't work out of the box to then be tied down to a slow download with massive patches sucking up the entire thing since they can't multi-task.  Then the concern if servers changing/going offline, things just being broken entirely with no way out in the long term, so I went back to PC.  Even if there are similar problems, you're not system bound, it'll work far more years later.

I don't have experience with consoles before the Wii + PS4, since those were my PC-only days.   Wii didn't update a whole lot.   PS4 will download updates in rest mode so that when you turn it on, the update is usually already downloaded and ready to install.    PC isn't immune to this stuff.  Every time Steam wants to update, it won't let me play anything until it completes the update, and the games will often require updates.   And there isn't just Steam,  if you're gaming on PC, you will probably have the Origin app installed for EA games, the Ubisoft App,  maybe the Epic store..   The Origin app seems to require an update everytime I open it without fail, and then the game I wanted to play will want an update on top of that,  and often the download speeds for these updates aren't close to what they should be.

 

And this isn't a PC problem.   Sometime about a decade ago, the software development industry decided that instead of doing quarterly updates like they had traditionally been doing,  they should issue updates constantly.   Some things will update weekly or every few days.   And if an update breaks things, just wait for another update.   I don't particularly like this model, but that's where we are at.

 

31 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

And free, so what, 20 whole games.

It's not just any 20 games, it's many of the Sony exclusives that people buy Playstations for-  Last of Us, Uncharted, Bloodborne, God of War,  with some big-name third party stuff thrown in there like Call of Duty and Battlefield 1.  All the big PS4 hits for new PS5 owners to help you not notice that there is very little PS5 content available yet. :)

 

40 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I'd never drop a grand on a GPU, I know some twits will but it's insane.  I think the 980 when I got it was around $500, but it has lasted me this long, longer than a console lifetime and outdid the PS3 that was kicking when I got it and the PS4-Pro it kept up with as well.  I can image the $1000 card just being utterly wasteful.

And most people don't,  in the nVidia lineup, the xx60 cards are the mainsteam models that by far sell the most units.  But to listen to people online, everyone has the latest RTX 2080, RTX 3080 and looking to upgrade to the 3090..

[Agamon]

13 hours ago, Keatah said:

As far as the stupid wanker coin minerz. I hear that Nvidia is making it so eternium minerz can't use their cards anymore. Not unless they buy a miner's edition or the compute version or something. MM-hmm..

It's just a market move to save face. Etenium is about to shut down its mining, and it does nothing to stop mining other kinds of crypto, so this really does nothing but sow confusion.

[Agamon]

18 hours ago, Swami said:

I read Sony will be making a big push to PC gaming. Since console companies lose a lot of money on the console itself, would it benefit them to migrate heavily to PC or would pirating be too much of a concern? Is it a problem for Steam?

The Sony PC games so far are on Steam, so it actually benefits both.

[cimerians]

Consoles today are dedicated  game PC’s, saw that coming for years and hated the lack of BC on Sony’s side so my last major console purchase was the Xbox One X. Won't be getting the new ones, don't need them.

Finally got a new machine this year my last one lasted 10 years and played everything pretty much perfectly. I got an AMD 5000 series CPU and am still using my GTX 1060.

One thing that scares people off is buying or building a machine and how they can comfortably play games so consoles are probably always going to sell but it makes sense that Sony or whatever wants to release some games on PC, that's where all the money and viewers are (streaming, competitive play etc). I can't remember where I read it but there was a huge surge of PC sales the last few years.  Probably a lot of young people trying to be the next big streamer.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

The real reason people pay the costs is for bragging rights.  That's why so many will spend $1000 on a GPU rather than a perfectly suitable $300 GPU,  then run side-by-side comparisons where they have to pause the video and magnify a section of a screen to find a slightly better texture and claim the difference is MASSIVE!   They are trying to justify spending so much.

Indeed. I kinda got to thinking how I could have been more efficient in the early days of 3D on the PC.

 

I would have likely gotten by nicely with about 1/4th the number of graphics cards and CPUs than I actually purchased. No thanks to MaximumPC egging me on into bragland.

 

From my vintage gaming days I have remaining:

Cirrus Logic 5422

Riva-128

TNT2 Ultra

GeForce 4 4600Ti

GeForce GTX 1080

 

In recent times I did acquire:

VirgeDX

Cirrus Logic 5428

..but for free and recent. So those don’t really count.

 

I don’t plan on getting anything till maybe the RTX 4xxx or 5xxx comes out. Maybe.
 

 

[zzip]

19 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Indeed. I kinda got to thinking how I could have been more efficient in the early days of 3D on the PC.

 

I would have likely gotten by nicely with about 1/4th the number of graphics cards and CPUs than I actually purchased. No thanks to MaximumPC egging me on into bragland.

 

I think when you first get into PC building, it is very easy to get obsessed with upgrades and chasing an extra 5% performance here, 10% there.   I remember buying more upgrades than I needed too.   Eventually upgrading the PC stops being fun and becomes a chore.  I'd upgrade every few years where I can double the performance or better instead of the small upgrades that provided almost imperceptible increases in real world tasks.

 

Overclocking was another thing.    I remember following an overclockers forum and noticing how people there would get a new card or CPU, brag about what kinds of FPS they were seeing, and then go buy another new card weeks later..   like are you using these things to actually play games or just run benchmarks?   This was back when overclocking actually meant putting your PC at risk, before overclocking became a marketing "feature".   Wait you're selling me a card that comes with enough cooling to safely run 20% faster than its stated spec?   Then why not make that the base rate, instead of trying to make me feeling like I'm getting away with something that it was designed to do??  :) 

[youxia]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

That's why so many will spend $1000 on a GPU rather than a perfectly suitable $300 GPU,  then run side-by-side comparisons where they have to pause the video and magnify a section of a screen to find a slightly better texture and claim the difference is MASSIVE!   They are trying to justify spending so much.

Or perhaps you, and many others following this deeply flawed logic, are trying to justify the decision of not spending money?

 

The truth is, there is no grand conspiracy which produces masses of brainwashed pcmasterrace gamers spending all that dosh for no real reason. The benefits from new hardware are very tangible and measurable, and sometimes differences in resulting IQ quality really are massive. For sure, there are plenty of flexible options and choices and anybody can make a decision as to what hardware suits their needs. If you are okay with playing the latest games with 30-60 fps and lower settings, then for sure, old-gen hardware will do. But if you aim for more, and want to add gfx mods, then you will need to spend more too, it's as simple as that. What's "suitable" for one person may not be for another. And claiming that a GPU or CPU from a 3x cheaper bracket (that 300 vs 1000 example) can produce the same results as the newer one is simply uninformed.

 

(I'm of course not talking about the current topsy-turvy Covid world of ridiculousness, or hardware with fresh, post launch prices)

 

 

 

Edited May 20, 2021 by youxia

[zzip]

49 minutes ago, youxia said:

And claiming that a GPU or CPU from a 3x cheaper bracket (that 300 vs 1000 example) can produce the same results as the newer one is simply uninformed.

I'm not saying they produce the same results,  I'm just saying the differences are becoming increasingly hard to see.   Sure, maybe the new card is displaying higher quality textures.   But when you are in a game trying to spot enemies before they spot you, you aren't looking at those textures-  you're looking for the enemy locations, checking your radar scope etc.  You don't have time to admire the slightly more realistic cloth physics on the guy who just shot you.

 

That's been my disappointment with my last PC GPU upgrade and my PS5 as well.   Sure the visuals are technically better, but it doesn't feel like it makes enough actual difference in the experience to justify the cost.

 

1 hour ago, youxia said:

Or perhaps you, and many others following this deeply flawed logic, are trying to justify the decision of not spending money?

deciding to not spend money on something non-essential is flawed logic? ok...

 

 

[Tanooki]

9 hours ago, cimerians said:

Consoles today are dedicated  game PC’s, saw that coming for years and hated the lack of BC on Sony’s side so my last major console purchase was the Xbox One X. Won't be getting the new ones, don't need them.

Finally got a new machine this year my last one lasted 10 years and played everything pretty much perfectly. I got an AMD 5000 series CPU and am still using my GTX 1060.

One thing that scares people off is buying or building a machine and how they can comfortably play games so consoles are probably always going to sell but it makes sense that Sony or whatever wants to release some games on PC, that's where all the money and viewers are (streaming, competitive play etc). I can't remember where I read it but there was a huge surge of PC sales the last few years.  Probably a lot of young people trying to be the next big streamer.

Definitely in the same boat.  PS3 was the last one I kept for the life of it and then some...PS4 lasted about 2 years and more than 1/2 put to being a movie box so I dumped it without regret.  Back in 2015 I got this mid-tier i7 chip that turbos in games to 3ghz, 16GB of ram(can get 32) but I put the money ($500~) to the best chip I could get the nvidia 980 with 8GB of ram on it.  It has more than served me well, blew the PS3 era out of the water, and still can match the PRO side of this dying off generation now, so not really sure where it will rest with the starting up one now.  But that says a lot really to me, I can get the console experience from those two without being stuck on those things...and stuck I would, realistically with both, to get what they both have I'd want to mess with and that there runs what...1000 between the pair?  I was like 1500 into it, but got a warranty on the thing for a few years along with the taxes on that so I was shy of 2k.  I went with xoticpc, picked every part, down to the chassis, but had them build it so I could get the coverage and no regrets there, it paid for itself due to a wonky HDD issue that reoccurred killing other stuff until I ditched it (off warranty) for a SSD and it has been a rock since.   Sure I put up for the parts at the time but I also didn't want to fall back into my 90s habits of the new PC run around every 2-2.5yrs so I could run stuff nice to excellently, not passable to chuggin'.  There definitely is a happy middle ground between going basic and going overkill that works in the long term.

[Keatah]

I like mid-range systems (or last year's top of the line components) which have been on the market for a while. This means not scraping the bottom and not paying $3500+ for 5% more performance.

 

Throw in a choice personal special upgrade to really make it your own.

[Mikebloke]

I was going to buy a PS3 to get FF13 but sister in law bought it instead, when I divorced that family I ended up getting everything on PC before I got a PS3 myself. 

I was going to buy a PS4 to get FF15 and 7 remake. I now have 15 on PC and will wait out and get 7 remake on PC one day. 

I Would have bought a PS5 to get FF16, but I will likely also wait for it to go on PC. 

 

For those that really really want these games, they'll get them on console. For those of us who realise we can wait, we will. I think I counted the "exclusive" X box 1 titles and how much they would cost second hand, I think it numbered about £40 for 6 games. Everything else could be found on PC or other consoles. Sony has a much bigger exclusivity library but I think even most of their developers aren't silly enough to not beat the PC piñata at the same time. 

[Tanooki]

I had a PS3 library before the PS4 came out and let the stuff go thinking it would be a non-garbage console (oops) and at that rate I couldn't make myself sit down and use the thing again re-buying much of the games, but did try on a few.  FF13 though had a really nice deal where it was super cheap on Steam so I went that route, and wow was I surprised at the upgrade visually that game had over playing it on the TV.  So the patience angle has some merit to it, as does the one about buying the last years model PC.  The setup I got (980 aside) was the last years model and it has served me very well to the point I've not had to even buy upgrade patchwork parts either in the meantime (more ram, boost the cpu, whatever.)  If I end up buying a PC this year or next, and that 3000 or 4000 line is what's fresh, I'll look one back, see no reason to pay the dumbass rate for someone who gets hard over an added 5% of performance.

[cimerians]

Just saw Playstations Steam store front. I wonder if Microsofts purchase of Zeni (Bethesda etc) also pressured them.

 

https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/playstationstudios

 

[Austin]

All I'll say is, if Sony ever gets around to a Bloodborne release on PC at 60fps.... day one purchase for me. ?

[Tanooki]

If they start dropping some of their high points of their IP from the PS3 era up on Steam I'm buying.  It would be awesome having the Uncharted Trilogy and God of War saga as well.