All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2024 edition]

[Cappuccino]

This is going to get too heated if we carry on like this. There's no way to prove either side in this. We can only present anecdotes and then people will interpret them based on their own experiences and beliefs. I've used PCs since the Amiga got superseded. I've known them from the days my mate was faffing around with .bats and LoadHigh trying to get his sound card working with some game, up to now where I built my own development PC. PCs are much improved, but random shit happens. As the family tech guy, I'm the person called on to solve some dumb laptop error and waste hours trying to identify and fix the issue. On fixed gaming hardware, significant problems are a hardware fault. On PC, it's not always. Sometimes some bits don't play nice together, with too many pieces assembled together. I've even had it on prebuilt systems, and you get manufacturer support with no idea how to solve the issue.

Maybe that is defective hardware, a tiny defect somewhere in a zillion components. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Either way, it's not a 'dead system' type you know it needs replacing, but at the user level it's just a random quirk that can't be solved and replacing the entire unit isn't an option because the GPU people blame the OS and the OS people blame the game and the game people say it's a fault of the SSD manufacturer and the SSD manufacturer says check with the GPU people...

Suffice to say, me as someone who's grown up around PCs and has a degree in Comp Sci and writes and debugs software with pretty great problem-identifying and resolution skills, who has no particular attachment to Sony tax and would love a Steam-like gaming OS, I'm still hesitant to swap to PC. You can call me stupid or naive or a liar or prejudiced or clueless or whatever makes you feel happy because your anecdotes don't align with mine - that's my thought process as a consumer and I dare say it's a common thought process and a primary reason why consoles continue to sell and will continue to do so even as the price increases.

I can respect that but I still think it is likely less of a hardship than you think and I would recommend you give it a try. I find the increased freedom of an open platform heavily outweighs the occasional bout of nonsense.

 

[Albuquerque]

Okay yes I’m speaking about a singular PC running basic hardware. Idk why you are talking about enterprise deployments

Because we aren't talking about one PC for a pair of IT-educated adults to maintain and play games with. That's ONE PC.

We're talking about millions of consoles sold to the masses as gaming appliances, at a scale that dwarfs even my enterprise experience. If you're having a hard time understanding why I'm comparing your singular anecode to a hundred thousand professionally-managed and enterprise-grade X86 devices which still required between dozens and hundreds of people in my org to maintain, then how are you going to convince anyone you understand the support requirements of the literally millions of PCs it would take to replace consoles?

My staff were all professionally trained in their varied disciplines, nearly all of them with costly professional certifications, with years (or even decades) of experience in their field and likely related fields. Even with highly qualified people, it was a LOT of full time positions worth of effort to maintain those in reliable, stable, patched, correctly configured, and life-cycled in an orderly fashion. Even with all the standards you mentioned, plus addititional corporate architecture standards in terms of hardware selection, operating system hardening, application deployment, and configuration management / enforcement, PCs absolutely still come apart for seemingly random reasons. There's a reason IT infrastructure and EUC departments are big, and it isn't because they're bored and need that many people for multiplayer locally hosted CounterStrike events.

The point is: consoles are a singular, comprehensive, purpose-built, and tightly controlled walled garden ecosystem for games and nothing else. They're radically less complex than a PC in so many ways, all of which are important for delivering a quality user experience to people who know literally nothing about a PC or its inner workings. And despite what you might think, that bolded section is the very most important part, because the overwhelming super-majority of the populace sits squarely in that bolded statement.

For those people who enjoy mucking with a PC almost as much as they enjoy gaming (myself included, you too) then PC gaming is still a great thing and IMO has the ability to provide a better experience than a console. I say "has the ability to" because it still ultimately depends on the game dev spending the time to create such an experience, versus just aiming for the common denominator of the console(s) where they expect the most money to be made.



EDIT about twenty minutes after posting this response: Want to see how a simple CPU upgrade can result in Windows gaming performance decrease without you ever knowing? Watch Steve from GamersNexus describe the error they found in their 7950X3D performance scores reported in their 9800X3D review. Cliff's notes: even after following AMD's own published 47 page configuration guide, along with a completely new 24H2 install of Win11, and then manually checking for core parking (which reported 100% successful), they still found out the AGESA config dorked up which CCD was parked after an upgrade from a non-X3D part to an X3D part, even though every AGESA and every OS configuration setting was exactly as AMD documented.

Again, this came from upgrading the CPU from a non-X3D to an X3D part, something a PC-literate person would absolutely do for all the gaming goodness reasons. Unfortunately, finding the error took quite a lot of digging, and is pretty likely to be missed by many of the "casual" computing enthusiasts even here in our forums. Someone who was very sure all the settings were correct (and, per all available documentation, absolutely ARE correct) would probably be left to assume the gaming performance uplift from the CPU upgrade just wasn't as good as reported.

 

[Cappuccino]

then how are you going to convince anyone you understand the support requirements of the literally millions of PCs it would take to replace consoles?

I'm not talking about supporting millions of PCs. People support their own handful of PCs, and it works just fine for 99.99% of people.

And despite what you might think, that bolded section is the very most important part, because the overwhelming super-majority of the populace sits squarely in that bolded statement.

In all my replies I have exclusively focused on people who know almost nothing about PCs. My wife can barely use Windows outside of opening Steam and using Google Docs, she's a Mac user. Works out just fine.

EDIT about twenty minutes after posting this response: Want to see how a simple CPU upgrade can result in Windows gaming performance decrease without you ever knowing? Watch Steve from GamersNexus describe the error they found in their 7950X3D performance scores reported in their 9800X3D review. Cliff's notes: even after following AMD's own published 47 page configuration guide, along with a completely new 24H2 install of Win11, and then manually checking for core parking (which reported 100% successful), they still found out the AGESA config dorked up which CCD was parked after an upgrade from a non-X3D part to an X3D part, even though every AGESA and every OS configuration setting was exactly as AMD documented.

This is a pretty obnoxious setup but given that these aren't exactly mainstream parts with strange core docking mechanisms that kinda makes sense. In the end this results in a minor performance issue. Someone like my non-technical friends or my dear wife wouldn't even notice lol. It's the type of thing that tech enthusiasts obsess over (maximum performance) but I'm talking about people that don't even know their monitor refresh rate. The PC experience is ironically more plug and play for those people because if their system isn't performing at 100% best performance, they don't care and won't spend the time doing things like this.

The point is: consoles are a singular, comprehensive, purpose-built, and tightly controlled walled garden ecosystem for games and nothing else.

I mean, I agree, I'm just saying we are vastly overstating how complicated it is using a normal PC for gaming. It gets more complicated when you add bespoke components but with just a CPU, GPU, RAM, nVME etc its a fairly streamlined experience and I have seen many non-technical people understand it very easily.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I can respect that but I still think it is likely less of a hardship than you think

Then the PC market needs to communicate itself better because that's the position they are trying to sell from. I'm not going to spend hundreds of pounds on a PC just to see if it works or not (I'm not spending £700 on a PS5Pro either!). The outward perception of PC has to be 'that looks easy and good value' if console owners are going to give up consoling.

 

[Cappuccino]

Then the PC market needs to communicate itself better because that's the position they are trying to sell from. I'm not going to spend hundreds of pounds on a PC just to see if it works or not (I'm not spending £700 on a PS5Pro either!). The outward perception of PC has to be 'that looks easy and good value' if console owners are going to give up consoling.

The ‘PC market’ doesn’t really need to do this because most hardware manufacturers are doing just fine based on the perception that exists. It’s the console market that is stumbling.

I feel this is kind of strange, we are on a forum discussing semiconductors and hardware design, some of the people here actually work at an IHV, yet we’re arguing that using a computer to play games is just too hard. With how technical this forum is nobody should have any problems with the elementary problems you’d see within the scope of building a gaming rig.

 

[iroboto]

There’s always going to be a market for people that dont want to be bothered.

But as someone that likes to step into computer shops, I frequently see children or young adults (11-19)

It’s more than just gaming, for many it’s tinkering, enthusiast mentality, building, interest, gaming, and other.

I imagine many of us posting here were likely those kids I see in the computer shop today!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I feel this is kind of strange, we are on a forum discussing semiconductors and hardware design, some of the people here actually work at an IHV, yet we’re arguing that using a computer to play games is just too hard.

No. It just seemingly comes with issues and when you just want to play games and tinkering with hardware isn't your hobby, that's a barrier.

With how technical this forum is nobody should have any problems with the elementary problems you’d see within the scope of building a gaming rig.

I don't. I just don't want to bother. Consoles are already getting too many issues for my liking!

And in this thread about sales, and where the point was raised about console gamers swapping to PC because of the better value, I presented an alternative perspective on why people might now want to. Are you suggesting I shouldn't have and should have either agreed with you or just kept my mouth shut? Or I should not be how I am and should like the same things you do?

With how discussion based this forum is nobody should have any problems discussing elementary alternative viewpoints within the scope of the discussion.

 

[Sonic]

Or maybe, just maybe the market and population are big enough where there's room for both console and PC gaming? Of course with a little overlap because there are those that game on both at varying rates. Because that's what the data tells me. Console gaming is in a waning stage while PC gaming is on an uptick.

Personally I don't feel like the console market is in its death bed, at least not yet. There are some trying times with console manufacturers being unable to reduce the price of their machines to expand the userbase. It's kinda sad to see we're at a point of diminishing returns where these consoles just can't follow the classic model of reducing price to expand their reach. Is what it is and the market dynamic we have in front of us. I suppose Xbox as a hardware platform maybe dead in the water and could potentially be contributing to life spending on consoles. Without being able to reduce the price of their machines they're limited in their reach in their ability to expand their userbase.

And things can change. The biggest release of this generation will be upon us next year so the party might not have even started yet.

 

[Globalisateur]

...

To the topic of PS5 Pro - Sony is just killing the scalpers right now. They'll lower the price rapidly as demand subsides. It's just smart.

I agree. They were right in the end with the price asked. At launch PS5 were selling at an average price of >€600 and scalpers were making the profits. I know people getting hoaxed and lost thousands of euros...

At 800€ it won't happen here and people really wanting the console, people and families who buy and love games, will succeed into finding one unit.

 

[chris1515]

(PS5 Pro also had a solid start, with units in the same ballpark as PS4 Pro's launch, but I'll break that down in more detail in a few weeks).

Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social)

(PS5 Pro also had a solid start, with units in the same ballpark as PS4 Pro's launch, but I'll break that down in more detail in a few weeks).

bsky.app

From mat Piscatella of NPD, it seems PS5 Pro had a solid start in US too.