The Cost - PC vs Console Gaming?

yimrsg

SaulGoode9 wrote: »

Just on the price of games. You say AAA releases are about €40 on console (personally, I haven't seen any that cheap). On PC, they are also around €40 at release but many of the them cost less than half that a month or two after release. Take Dishonored for example, released last month and last week was available on PC for €14. ShadowHearth has given more examples above.

The emboldened part simply isn't true. It's very easy to make back the initially higher price of a PC as you have access to films, music, TV, internet, far greater value in cost of games and far greater range of games to choose from

NTMK wrote: »

I havent seen a single release this year on PS3/360 for €40 if anything they've edged closer to RRP if anything


Steam sales mean you can 2/3 month old games for less than €20 also you have a multitude of sites selling pc games a lot less than retail


Good value @ 200 and you do get value for money from consoles but to say that its harder to get the same from a PC is laughable.
every pc is capable of being a far better Media center than the consoles, you also get free online play (€30-40 a year on 360), a decent internet browser, larger range of top quality indie games, Modding commuinities, F2P games and a whole host of things the consoles cant do.

Halo 4 was €44 in argos. Black Ops 2 €40 in supervalu. Just because you haven't seen bargains doesn't mean they're not there. If you shop around on consoles and use price comparison websites there is no way you should be parting with €60 for new releases on any format. They're both bricks and mortar stores in Ireland too.

Right now there is only £4-5 difference in xcom/dishonoured/ac3 on the various systems. The gap is insignificant if you buy a preowned game on console. Game costs are largely the same.

ShadowHearth

yimrsg wrote: »

Halo 4 was €44 in argos. Black Ops 2 €40 in supervalu. Just because you haven't seen bargains doesn't mean they're not there. If you shop around on consoles and use price comparison websites there is no way you should be parting with €60 for new releases on any format. They're both bricks and mortar stores in Ireland too.

Right now there is only £4-5 difference in xcom/dishonoured/ac3 on the various systems. The gap is insignificant if you buy a preowned game on console. Game costs are largely the same.

wasnt the second hand game market was the one that is killing the gaming industry? :pac:
funny enough second hand games mostly mean feck all on savings these days thx to online pass system, a hole, that console gamers and gamestop dug themselfs.

NTMK

yimrsg wrote: »

Halo 4 was €44 in argos. Black Ops 2 €40 in supervalu. Just because you haven't seen bargains doesn't mean they're not there. If you shop around on consoles and use price comparison websites there is no way you should be parting with €60 for new releases on any format. They're both bricks and mortar stores in Ireland too.

Right now there is only £4-5 difference in xcom/dishonoured/ac3 on the various systems. The gap is insignificant if you buy a preowned game on console. Game costs are largely the same.

€10 difference with xcom on gamestop.ie and Zavvi
€15-20 with ac3 on the same websites
€10 with dishonored on gamestop (zavvi dont have pc version)

thats €35 saved on 3 games

the cases with supervalu and argos only do these deals on a big release like halo or cod

ShadowHearth

NTMK wrote: »

€10 difference with xcom on gamestop.ie and Zavvi
€15-20 with ac3 on the same websites
€10 with dishonored on gamestop (zavvi dont have pc version)

thats €35 saved on 3 games

the cases with supervalu and argos only do these deals on a big release like halo or cod

i would even put blops 2 as an exception. i am pretty sure they sold it at lower then recommended price. i would be surprised they even made any money on it.
i havent seen any console AAA game sell for less then 45eu in shops.

if someone from gamesnash would pop in, he could put some light on this.

marco_polo

gizmo wrote: »

You'd be surprised at the recommended specs for the next gen engines.

I'm guessing you're not permitted to share?

NTMK

marco_polo wrote: »

I'm guessing you're not permitted to share?

if hes talking Unreal engine 4, the tech demo that was shown used 3 GTX680's (€1200 of gpus) but its far from optimised yet

EDIT: its down to a single 680 apparently

and will probably be down to 7770/8770 level by the time the NGC's are released

gizmo

NTMK wrote: »

if hes talking Unreal engine 4, the tech demo that was shown used 3 GTX680's (€1200 of gpus) but its far from optimised yet

That was the Samaritan demo which was running on a modified Unreal Engine 3.

The Unreal 4 demo at E3 was running on a high end i7 with 16GB RAM and a Geforce 680. Bearing in mind, that was a three room demo with, relatively speaking, very little going on

ShadowHearth

gizmo wrote: »

That was the Samaritan demo which was running on a modified Unreal Engine 3.

The Unreal 4 demo at E3 was running on a high end i7 with 16GB RAM and a Geforce 680. Bearing in mind, that was a three room demo with, relatively speaking, very little going on.

i would not say something like gtx 680 is a thing to buy ( i own it thought )

there are some GPUS, like 7950 Club 3d royal king, which are 280eu and overclocks like some space ship and is faster then overclocked gtx 680.

http://lb.hardwareversand.de/3072+MB/66982/Club+3D+Radeon+HD+7950+royalKing%2C+3GB+GDDR5%2C+AMD+Radeon+HD+7950%2C+PCI-+Express.article

gizmo

ShadowHearth wrote: »

i would not say something like gtx 680 is a thing to buy ( i own it thought )

there are some GPUS, like 7950 Club 3d royal king, which are 280eu and overclocks like some space ship and is faster then overclocked gtx 680.

http://lb.hardwareversand.de/3072+MB/66982/Club+3D+Radeon+HD+7950+royalKing%2C+3GB+GDDR5%2C+AMD+Radeon+HD+7950%2C+PCI-+Express.article

Certainly agree, that's why I wouldn't buy a high end GPU now if I wanted it to last 2+ years.

*pats Gigabyte 670 Windforce*

On top of the Unreal 4 specs you also had the leaked Durango dev kit and the Stationary Computing Device spec sheet from the XBox Surface leak.

I've no idea what the final specs will be but between all of that info, I can't say I'm worried about the next gen of consoles being underpowered by any stretch of the imagination.

marco_polo

I certainly don't expect them to be underpowered but at the same time the base hardware is likely to be a fair bit less than an i7 + GTX680? And while you can of course squeeze an awful alot more out of the hardware on a console, its shouldn't be a quantum leap forward from what will be running on good PC built late next year, given it is expected that the next generation of upper mid range cards should have close to GTX680 levels of performance, and that even Epic expect to have to reign UE4 back a little bit for Orbis and Durango from the tech demo levels.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-curious-case-of-the-durango-devkit-leak

If this is a tech demo, just how much of it will we see in actual next-gen titles? The UE4 demo is running on PC, specifically an Intel Core i7 processor with an NVIDIA GTX680 and 16GB of RAM - what Epic terms a standard development box. This is almost certainly considerably beyond the base hardware of both Orbis and Durango, but factoring in the advantages of a fixed hardware platform with dedicated APIs, the gap narrows.

"Obviously we don't know what the final specs are for the next-generation consoles and I'm sure we'll have to make trade-offs to put a final quality game onto whatever comes out," says Alan Willard.

"We have a pretty good history of making our tech demos look like what our final games are. Gears started off as a tech demo years ago at E3 in 2004 or so. We certainly don't try to fake what we're capable of doing. Obviously the engine is very new, we're still exploring what we can do with it and as more details come out on what the next generation hardware is, we'll have better ideas on what our final trade-offs will be. We're still waiting to find out ourselves."

EDIT: One thing I am glad to see from the link Gizmo posted is that there is a "very strong suggestion that the era of custom console hardware is now very much a thing of the past.", which can only be a good thing as the amount of effort required to make cross platform games, is currently a major cost for developers, and is time and effort that could be much better spent focusing on making better games.

KilOit

Throw 800-1000€ into a pc build now and it'll be more powerful than next gen consoles, i guarantee it!

From the bits of info leaking about xbox 720 and ps4 by the time they're released they would be the equivalent to a mid range pc.
The likes of a GTX690 (godlike graphics card!) will have come down in price with even better cards out there by the time they're released.

gizmo

marco_polo wrote: »

I certainly don't expect them to be underpowered but at the same time the base hardware is likely to be a fair bit less than an i7 + GTX680? And while you can of course squeeze an awful alot more out of the hardware on a console, its shouldn't be a quantum leap forward from what will be running on good PC built late next year, given it is expected that the next generation of upper mid range cards should have close to GTX680 levels of performance, and that even Epic expect to have to reign UE4 back a little bit for Orbis and Durango from the tech demo levels.

I don't think it'll be any kind of leap forward from a good PC built late next year, no. As I said, I just don't think the midspec machines which are being built now as an alternative (albeit a wildly more powerful one at this stage ) to this generation of consoles will last long once the next gen come in.

I could of course be wrong (most of this is just an educated guess) but from what we've seen so far, I wouldn't bet against it.

KilOit wrote: »

Throw 800-1000€ into a pc build now and it'll be more powerful than next gen consoles, i guarantee it!

I'd wager that if you build it around a non-hyperthreaded quad core CPU then it won't. Look at the specs of the machines listed above, if you have engines which are capable of taking advantage of all of those cores then you're going to run into difficulties if your CPU isn't able to match them. We've been fine so far since even the latest and greatest haven't taxed us that much, probably why my lowly Q9550 has managed to keep up for so long.

No idea about the GPU however, while I can't see it beating the raw grunt of desktop orientated parts, it probably depend more on whether eDRAM is embraced again since, as we've seen with this generation, it can do wonders for cards based around lower end hardware. You can also be guaranteed that since they'll be built on DX11-based hardware you'll actually see renderers written to take advantage of the multi-threaded capabilities it introduced.

_Kaiser_

I've always been a PC gamer. I did have an XBox 360 a few years ago but I rarely used it so sold it about a year later. I also found the controller was a little too large/awkward from my tastes (but maybe I was just used to keyboards, mice and joysticks)

But even though I still have a PC and am looking at it right now, my usage has changed completely in the last few years.

- Laptop for 90% of my work/home use - Vostro 3350 with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD and a seperate ATI graphics chipset

- WDTV Live Streaming connected to the 42" LG here for my media

- Precision 690 Workstation (formerly 2 different PowerEdge servers) that runs my home Domain, media share (gotta love Mezzmo and the Support is fantastic), and test box - all running in Hyper-V VM's under Server 2012/2008 R2 (Technet is great, but not as much value as it was admittedly!)

... previously all of that (except for the server stuff) would have been running on my PC.

My current PC then is a DELL XPS 630i that I got for about €250 on Adverts earlier this year. Threw in a 2GB HD7970 and 8GB RAM and overclocked the Q6600 to 3Ghz and it runs anything I've thrown at it perfectly at high settings.. BF3, Borderlands 2 etc (Side note: I do like the case/design so any thoughts on a compatible motherboard upgrade?)

I find I don't have the time to invest in gaming anymore , but it's nice that when I do come home after a long day, that I can fire it up and jump into the latest games with the lads if I want. I also like RTS's and Simulators so a console wouldn't be a great choice for these either anyway.

I have spent a fortune on PC gear though for the 2 machines, but eBay and Adverts are my friends there so it lessens the pain and I've swapped stuff between machines a lot. The Precision for example has the CPUs and the 24GB of RAM from the 2 servers as well as the 4.5 TB of storage I was using in them

Headshot

I love pc gaming but it slightly pisses me off I cant trade in or sell most games

tuxy

marco_polo wrote: »

I'm guessing you're not permitted to share?

I think he must have inside information so is probably bound by a NDA

Some people are basing it on the hardware that has been used to run a demo but of course that would be foolish.

Out of interest what hardware did the unreal 3 engine demo run on in 2004?

Grumpypants

It is hard to answer , consoles right now are far cheaper to get into initialy as you will not get a PC for 150 euro but you will get a console. To get a PC you really do needto spend about 800 but then the games are cheaper. So it depends on whether you will buy enough games to make up the difference. Short term hit for long term gain. Similar to putting solar panels on your house, its cheaper to use oil but in the long run the solar is cheaper it just takes years to balance out.

That is now, next year the new consoles will be closer to that big investment. They will be 600 and games will be more expensive too so it changes everything again.

Then you balance that a PC can be upgraded to stay in line / jump ahead of consoles.

And then the steam sales wrecks everything as you save a lot but you buy hundreds of games that you never wanted and will never play :-)

aN.Droid

Grumpypants wrote: »

It is hard to answer , consoles right now are far cheaper to get into initialy as you will not get a PC for 150 euro but you will get a console. To get a PC you really do needto spend about 800 but then the games are cheaper. So it depends on whether you will buy enough games to make up the difference. Short term hit for long term gain. Similar to putting solar panels on your house, its cheaper to use oil but in the long run the solar is cheaper it just takes years to balance out.

That is now, next year the new consoles will be closer to that big investment. They will be 600 and games will be more expensive too so it changes everything again.

Then you balance that a PC can be upgraded to stay in line / jump ahead of consoles.

And then the steam sales wrecks everything as you save a lot but you buy hundreds of games that you never wanted and will never play :-)

You can get a pc for ~400 that will play most games out right now at higher detail than consoles. Even cheaper if you want to play at console quality (720P, 30FPS) and will have access to cheaper games and everything else that comes with a pc.

cherryghost

Limericks wrote: »

You can get a pc for ~400 that will play most games out right now at higher detail than consoles. Even cheaper if you want to play at console quality (720P, 30FPS) and will have access to cheaper games and everything else that comes with a pc.

I managed that feat with a 250 euro PC tbh. Built one myself last month. Plays everything on medium at 720p, even looks better than the console counterpart some of the time

Antar Bolaeisk

Plus you're probably going to want a laptop or whatever alongside your console for doing normal computery things which is of course added cost.

Grumpypants

Fair play I only got a mouse, keyboard , windows 7 and a case, maybe a power source for 250.

Still had to add a motherboard , RAM, a processor, hard drive, graphics card and disk drive. So you did well to get all those parts for 250.

Had to spend closer to a grand to get something that can run at a noticeable level above consoles and at that you are limited to the handful of games built for PC like bf3.

Then you have to factor in the cost of broadband as shops don't really stock boxed pc games anymore so that adds 400-500ish a year and negates any savings on steam sales.

Antar Bolaeisk

Grumpypants wrote: »

Then you have to factor in the cost of broadband as shops don't really stock boxed pc games anymore so that adds 400-500ish a year and negates any savings on steam sales.

While you don't need broadband for consoles it's still a requirement for online gaming which a lot of people partake in. It's unlikely you're not going to have broadband though you probably will have caps. According to comreg approximately 55% of households now have access to broadband, 23% to fixed line and 36% to other.

I seem to recall some advert in a paper recently claiming that broadband was more important to people than water according to a survey so it's likely you'd have it being a gamer or not.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

plus if we're talking cost here, if you're buying games on steam most of the year you're a ****ing idiot

ShadowHearth

Grumpypants wrote: »

Fair play I only got a mouse, keyboard , windows 7 and a case, maybe a power source for 250.

Still had to add a motherboard , RAM, a processor, hard drive, graphics card and disk drive. So you did well to get all those parts for 250.

Had to spend closer to a grand to get something that can run at a noticeable level above consoles and at that you are limited to the handful of games built for PC like bf3.

Then you have to factor in the cost of broadband as shops don't really stock boxed pc games anymore so that adds 400-500ish a year and negates any savings on steam sales.

Wtf did I just read ?!

mikom

Grumpypants wrote: »

Then you have to factor in the cost of broadband as shops don't really stock boxed pc games anymore so that adds 400-500ish a year and negates any savings on steam sales.

I connect my console to multiplayer gaming via some empty cans and a length of string.......

PogMoThoin

What good is either a PC or console without broadband, go buy a new console game, you can't play until you download the update

tuxy

PogMoThoin wrote: »

What good is either a PC or console without broadband, go buy a new console game, you can't play until you download the update

Why not? I'm sure looks of people are playing unpatched games

ShadowHearth

mikom wrote: »

I connect my console to multiplayer gaming via some empty cans and a length of string.......

dont forget postal services went out of business yesterday too, so no way getting those tasty games, which you bough in online shops, delivered :pac:

Andy!!

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

plus if we're talking cost here, if you're buying games on steam most of the year you're a ****ing idiot

I didnt realise I was an idiot!! Thanks for filling me in!

Andy!!

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Wtf did I just read ?!

What part confuses you, seems clear to me.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

Andy!! wrote: »

I didnt realise I was an idiot!! Thanks for filling me in!

glad I could help