Your 670 was the same price as an entire PS4.
I'm not sure why you're cherry picking one individual purchase when my argument was clearly about the long term cost of ownership. I bought that 670 over 18 months before the PS4 launched and it absolutely slaughtered the PS3 in that period.
A couple years in and it was already struggling just to match a PS4.
No, that's completely false. the 670 easily exceeded the PS4's performance in the vast majority of games for a good 4-5 years after it's launch. It was only really once Pascal had become well established and both devs and Nvidia stopped properly supporting the architecture that is started to fall behind in a handful of games. And yes, I'm aware of the few games that are particularly poorly suited to its architecture like Doom Eternal where it falls well below its performance potential. They are not the norm.
You then spent another ~$400 on a 1070.
That was 4 years later, not 2. And it had nothing whatsoever with keeping up with the PS4 because at that point there was not one single game that I came across, where I couldn't comfortably exceed its performance. The reason I bought the 1070 was primarily because my 670 started having power issues and would randomly shut down the system. That, and the 1070 was a monster which provided a near generational performance leap. If I were only concerned with keeping ahead of console performance at that point at the cheapest possible cost I'd have got a 1060. Or even an older/cheaper GTX 970.
You are now at double the investment on GPUs alone not even factoring in any other upgrades you required.
Again, you're cherry picking a time period that suits your argument rather than looking across the long term which is what my original argument was.
Since the start of the millennium 22 years ago, PS2 to PS5 will have cost around $1700 in console costs. I think it's reasonable to add another $300 on top of that in additional peripherals & accessories to give $2000 in hardware costs.
My PC purchases over that time would have been very roughly $2800 on GPU's and £1500 on CPU/mem/Mobo upgrades. Let's say another $1200 over that period on supporting bits for a total cost of $5500.
So yes, on hardware alone we're looking at a fairly big gap.
But this is across 22 years. Spend an average of $50 per year over the last 9 years on online subscription fees and that's an additional $450 on the console side bringing it up to about $2450.
The average selling price of new games absolutely was and always has been higher on consoles than PC so with an average saving of $5 (you know I'm low balling that, especially in the early years) say over 10 games per year - over 22 years, that's another $1100 bringing the console total to $3450.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't have spent the last 22 years without any form of PC but let's say you really cheaped out and purchased just 2 el-cheapo units to get you by at $400 each. You are now up to $4250, just $1250 less that the PC outlay - over 22 years. $900 / 22 = $57 per year. So just as I said, very comparable over the long term and I've been ahead of console performance over that period for the vast majority of those 22 years. Granted I'm behind right now so for purity of comparison we should probably include the cost of a new GPU on there bringing the PC cost up to $6k or the average yearly difference up to about $80 in the consoles favour. But again, at that point I'll be well ahead of console performance for likely another 4 years or more.
Console games have sales just like PC games too. Those same questionably legit key sites that sell PC games also sell console games.
Yes, but they are generally more expensive on console regardless.
Console subscriptions also have sales. You can also sell and trade in/buy used console games which isnt even an option on PC.
And PC's literally have free game giveaways constantly. Half my current games library is free games. I do accept the point on second hand games though if that's something you're happy doing.
I don't agree the pricing situation will be resolved. Prices are trending upwards, not downwards for new GPUs.
I was talking about my personal situation of being behind console performance (a position I'm not at all used to). It'll be resolved as soon as the mid-range parts launch next year, even if at that point I go Ampere because they're too expensive. In any case, $500 now will put me ahead of PS5 performance. Although I'm willing to wait another few months and spend a couple hundred more for console demolishing performance. Afterall, I should be able to enjoy it for a good 3-4 years at least.
Your specific need for a PC is legitimate but that's a different argument.
Exactly, that's just my personal situation. One where I was less concerned about value vs console and more with the best performance at a reasonable cost. That just happens to have put me within $100 per year of console cost over the last 22 years but on the flip side has almost always resulted in comfortably, or massively more performance over that period.
Had I been more specific in targeting only console level performance or slightly better, I may have even come in cheaper over the long term.
