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PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Gaming
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I still wonder why console players allowed their online services to require subscriptions in the first place.
I don't think it was a choice. Xbox did it first and that's why I bought a ps3. Then sony introduced it. Then nintendo. It's still less expensive than a PC hobby. Consumers don't have much say in what these companies do or how they operate.
Only if you plan on either never paying for an online sub for the console or paying for an online sub for less than 5 years on the console, and also take into consideration that a PC can both game and be a computer you can use for other things.
A gaming PC has a higher upfront cost, but it’s a better long-term value. Let’s say you buy a PS5 for $500, and then pay for 5 years of PS+ for the old price, $60. That’s $800 for a friggin console already, but let’s also consider that most people either have a laptop or a tablet for doing computer-related tasks. Reasonable people would pay probably somewhere in the $400-$600 range, but let’s give the console a chance and say we got a $400 laptop. That’s $1200 now.
Using that $1200 as a budget, you can get a computer with a 4060ti, a 12th gen i5, a 1TB NVME SSD, and 16GB RAM for around $1100. Note that, say, 5 years down the line from buying this PC, you can just swap in and out parts as you want and be able to sell old parts for some money back, so staying up-to-date to play whatever current games can be cheaper too depending on the part prices.
Also anecdotally parts seem to be lasting much longer than they used to. Maybe I'm just playing fewer games, maybe I care about graphics less, or maybe there actually is a technical reason but in the early 00s when I first started building computers I was essentially forced to upgrade about every 2 or 3 years but now I'm still running on my 7 year old desktop with a 1070 -- I was going to upgrade the graphics card but the crypto mining boom priced me out and lo and behold I'm still able to play whatever I want with nary a difficulty. Even Baldur's Gate 3 runs just fine, with a little chugging.
The percentage of the industry that can afford to push modern graphics to their limit has only shrunk over time as the development time required to make games that taxing has increased. That's why most of what you play isn't particularly high-spec.