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Comment by edude03 | Hacker News Reader

In the case of game consoles though, they're essentially general purpose PCs that are sold to under cost with the expectation that they'll make their money back on game sales. I think that's a fair assumption, and of course if game consoles weren't locked down it would open the doors for people to get x compute power for less than it would be worth otherwise.

Whether you agree with that model or not, it's definitely different than the iPhone model where you are paying full price for the hardware, but are limited in what software you can run on it.

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Nintendo tends not to sell their consoles at a loss. People criticize them for using older hardware but they make a profit on every unit sold plus their first party titles drive the console sales to a large degree.

If Microsoft and Sony could no longer take a cut of all software sales like Apple does, they’d simply be forced to adapt their business model, perhaps to something similar to Nintendo’s. Gamers would either have to pay full price for modern hardware (less volume discounts) or otherwise settle for older parts. Microsoft and Sony would have to focus a lot more on bringing top developers in-house with exclusive publishing contracts. Life would go on.

Under cost? My understanding is that consoles cost MORE than an equivalent self-built PC, and that the expectation that sells them is the guarantee that the games will WORK. On an actual PC, there's no guarantee that any software works with your particular configuration. That is, consoles standardize system specs, and include a markup reflecting that.

> consoles standardize system specs, and include a markup reflecting that

That's an interesting take that I didn't consider - that console manufacturer can charge money for the guarantee that the games will work.

However, from a quick google, two sites [0][1] have tried to build a PC with the same specs as the PS4 Pro ($400) and came up to ~700.

[0]: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/we-built-a-pc-using-ps4-pr...

[1]: https://modcrash.com/the-ps4-equivalent-pc-build/

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