PS5 has 16 gigs of GDDR6. I have no idea how it compares to DDR5 price-wise when bought in bulk, but 16 gigs of DDR5 has gone up by like 150 dollars over the last 9 months or so.

I doubt they have a contract for endless memory at X price forever. Memory and storage prices have gone up so much that the memory and storage of a PS5 has for sure risen 200+ dollars in price over the last 9 or 10 months if you buy them as separate modules as a consumer.

Cost of 2 TB SSD and 16 gigs of RAM (what you get in a PS5 Pro at 900 EUR once the price hike kicks in) if bought as a consumer, is about 450 EUR in my country. That's without anything else (motherboard, CPU, GPU, power supply) that the device contains. Of course it has shared memory so perhaps you should be looking at 8 gigs of memory (still 100+ EUR) and an 8 gig graphics card of roughly equivalent TFLOPS since it's kinda hard to put a value tag on the other features its' GPU has - The RX 7600 starts at 300 EUR. So that'd be like 250+100+300 for storage + RAM + GPU. Still without a CPU, power supply, or any other electronics. Shit, the cheapest wi-fi 7 module I can find on sale in my country alone is 80 euros.

Worst part is, RAM and storage prices aren't really even showing any signs of slowing down.

All things considered, I reckon they still have pretty low margins for their hardware compared to PC parts manufacturers. Which they can afford because they make it back on the game store margins.

RAM, HDDs, etc are magically not going up in price for them? You think they got some sort of deal that the much bigger manufacturers couldn't negotiate somehow?

Consoles were also a lot simpler then. And we were finding lots of ways to reduce cost ( chip count reduction, etc) as technology evolved rapidly

Back then we didn't have another bubble inflating prices every other year. :/

But it's a whole console for the same price as 64GB memory, what a deal!

Xbox hasn’t quite left the market, they’re just slowly sleepwalking down a pier. We’ll see if they wake up before they walk off the end and end up drowning. I’m certainly not holding my breath.

Memory. Xbox raised their prices already.

Since the Sega MegaDrive, I've always been a console kid.

I don’t anymore, ps5 was my last and I barely use it. It wasn’t worth buying, but I use my ps4 incredibly heavily.

I used to do console because it was easier. You know a game put out for a system is compatible with your hardware. You don’t have to fiddle with things to get them to work properly, much less well.

It used to be a decent value proposition. It was worth it enough that I’ve had every non-handheld console for decades. The games would be sold cheap used, they always worked, and used consoles were cheap. If you stuck with the secondhand market you could get a system and like 20 games for the price of buying the system and one game of $50 value new. But you could also resell the games if needed for some reason. It was an investment, and it definitely paid off. My collections is worth almost 10 grand now, and I certainly didn’t spend half that much on it, when each game was $10 or less.

Those value propositions changed when physical media stopped being the main thing. Now used games sell for near what new ones do, because they just didn’t make that many. And why would they continue to make them when everyone downloads?

So now your question is valid, but it didn’t used to be in the same way.

There are fewer and fewer reasons as time goes on, but the big one is that it's usually a lower up-front cost (in a lot of cases, still is) and just works without any fuss. We might find the fuss on PC to be pretty minimal, but on console, it approaches 0. PCs have gotten easier to work with, people have become more literate in how to use them, and the long-term savings on PC with a significantly sized library have become more apparent, but there will always still be a market for something like a console, even if that means they abandon some of their defining traits in order to survive the future.

because pc gaming is a huge pain in the ass.

console gaming is not.

some of us just want to play games. we don't care about 120 fps bragging rights or spending hours resolving driver issues. console is superior experience for that.

I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can't be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.

Because I like sitting down after a long day and playing games on my big ass oled tv.

I don't like sitting down and turning on my computer so that it can update Windows, then the game itself needs to be updated. Then the game runs like shit because my graphics drivers updated to a newer version that doesn't work well with the game I'm playing. So then I have to do some research to find the best driver version to downgrade to. So then I finally get the driver issue fixed and start the game, but now my controller isn't working because the windows update broke the Logitech drivers my controller needs. So now it's been two hours, I'm tired, I didn't get to play any games, and I still have more work to do tomorrow to get things working.