Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpotato | Hacker News Reader

Playstation Plus is what lead to my eventual move to PC Gaming. I didn't (and still don't) see the benefit of having to pay monthly just to play games that I want to play. At the time (ps3/4 era), most if not all the free games were all indy games and games I had no interest in playing. That meant that I was paying full price for games I wanted to play and I had to pay a monthly fee just to play online multiplayer (and internet of course). Moving to PC saved me something like 30$/month for something that gave me little to no value.

If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.

View on HN

As a counterpoint I got an Xbox Series X because the cost of building a decent gaming computer has become ridiculous.

Just the GPU would cost me as much as the whole console and as my desktop PC has an ancient motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. I'd have to replace everything.

The Game Pass has been a pretty good deal so far, but I agree that having to pay just for online multiplayer is ridiculous and of course they could jack up the Game Pass price tomorrow and I'd have little recourse.

Quick Resume and being able to play on the sofa is decent as well when I don't have much time.

The main thing I miss is all the smaller games like Valheim etc. especially since AAA games have become less appealing as they just seem like time-sinks aimed to optimise "engagement".

For me the cost of gaming on PC is just whatever I need to add on top of a standard workstation, which is mostly just a bumped up graphics card. Only late last year did I finally upgrade the bones of a PC I've been running since 2009, which is a hell of a cycle.

If you're chasing top performance and regular upgrade cycles I agree, it can be a pit of (up to) infinity monies.

The current situation with GPU prices and coin mining etc does make things especially tricky right now if you're not already set up with a gaming rig from the past ~5 years.

Yeah, my PC is from 2015 (and it wasn't state of the art then..) so it's quite a pain to replace.

Also I have an Ultrawide monitor which perhaps isn't the best for gaming, but is far superior for work.

To be fair we're in one of the worst chip shortages in a long time, GPUs are supposed to be like 3-600 for low to early high range. Still one of the most expensive parts for sure but right now is especially atypical.

>To be fair we're in one of the worst chip shortages in a long time, GPUs are supposed to be like 3-600 for low to early high range.

What's your point exactly? The recently released PS5 and Xbox Series X had launch prices of $400-$500 in the U.S.

So, even without the chip shortage, GP's point about the GPU alone costing more than a console still stands.

You don't need a beefy rig to play games. The majority of developers are already struggling to produce art assets that can put a strain on top-tier hardware. The PS5 launch was dominated by two games: Demon's Souls, a jaw-droppingly beautiful game that made great use of the hardware, and Bugsnax, whose graphics looked like it could have been a Gamecube game (don't take this as a denigration). The hyped PC game of the past two weeks has been Valheim (having the fifth most-simultaneous players of any Steam game ever), whose graphics compare favorably to Tribes 2, a game from 2001. A select number of AAA studios have the resources to invest in pushing the graphical envelope; everyone else can get by just fine on five year-old hardware.

Valheim is very poorly optimised right now, graphics aside. I am not sure how well it works on older hardware but on my RTX2060 and corresponding CPU I get frame drops all the time and global locks when it decides to save the world state in combat or I walk towards somewhere new. I'd imagine it's worse on an older computer, it'll run but it might not be as enjoyable at sub-30-FPS.

Hardware creep inevitabily leads to optimisation decisions about how much effort to spend getting things to run well.

I do agree that PC hardware tends to last around 5 years now though unless you run the latest AAA games, and there is a wealth of older games. Just the stuff I missed since 2000 would be enough to keep me busy for at least a decade.

i5-4XXX + R7 260X (a very bad and old card) works well at 1080p low settings. 3800X + 1080Ti gets you 58 fps at 4k.

YMMV but be sure to put the window in fullscreen, that helps with the frame drops.

I play sufficiently modern games virtualized (VFIO) on an i5-2500. If FullHD is fine for you, old hardware is still extremely good.

And, of course, the Demon Souls game you touted as the graphically impressive one, originally played well on a PS3.

The new version makes full use of the GPU on the PS5, visually it's far more impressive. Not having played either I have no idea whether the gameplay differs between the two!

People will say "you don't need a $500 card to play PC games", but they'll never acknowledge the caveat that a budget card won't run games anywhere near as nice as a PS5/XSX.

1. You don't need a $300 GPU to play modern games on a gaming PC. 2. Sony and Microsoft subsidize the cost of the hardware. They lose money on every console that goes out the door and make their cash on online passes, accessories and individual games. After a couple years the cost to produce goes down and they start to make some margin on them.

This is the way they've been doing it for several console generations now.

I have a memory of reading that the strategy Nintendo have used from the n64 days, was always make a slight loss on each console but make big profit on games and developer licences, so that they start making profit after the third or fourth game sold per console

Edit: looked for proof but for the life of me I can't find evidence amongst all the results for articles and blog posts reminiscing about old games and consoles!

Nintendo is the exception where the hardware are *not* sold at loss, but rather alight profit.

See https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nint...

At even $600 a GPU will last you longer than the quality of a similar gaming device like that. I guarantee the games on the console begin to look dated and lose out on features much sooner than building your rig.

If a console is $500 and lasts 3 years your $600 gpu, and overall build (mine is about $1200 new but has features that I splurged on for work and could be 300 cheaper for just gaming) will last at least double if not a little more than double that time. At least that's been my experience.

I would say looking at lifetime value building your own rig is much more cost effective and has a much higher lifetime on graphical features that are added.

As an example my 1070 that I only replaced this year and only because I felt like it was easily still getting me 80+ fps in modern games and supporting new features like DLSS.

I could have easily kept using it and been fine for a few more years with new features and updates all the time.

What $600 GPU is going to look like a PS5 though? The new consoles run games at 60fps/120hz on top of the line screens, that's a lot of performance for a budget PC.

No, no it wouldn't. A 600 dollar GPU these days is a 3060ti which is rather unfortunate.

The Xbox Series X and PS5 are phenomenal pieces of hardware that are pushing the limits of consumer goods. Both support 4k 120hz and HDMI 2.1, free sync and much more.

Instant on, fast resume, keyboard/mouse, controllers, they're a hell of a bargain.

The Xbox One is older than the 1070 and cost much less and still is supported to this day.

Are those running max setting 4k 120hz? Because a 3060ti even now under the rather ridiculous prices can handle that at medium on a lot of games. I'm legitimately asking, I'll probably pick up a PS5 when the world is more sane so I haven't looked into the latest generation just comparing my experience with the previous generation of consoles vs my pc.

Yes...

I have the Xbox Series X and just got a LG OLED 55" tv and it's all running at 120hz with freesync, HDR and looks beautiful.

I have a regular 3060 i scored from newegg and it can't keep up with with the XSX does... my 3060 cost 499 and my XSX cost 499...

PS5/XSX is extreme value right now... and to be honest, the 0% pay 31/month deal is stupid easy and affordable to jump in - much easier than paying scalping rates or hoping for lotto slots from vendors just to buy a video card.

I got a PS5 through playstation direct as well when they do their lottos, but i'm a fan of gamepass so i sold the ps5 to a friend at retail cost.

why would a console last 3 years (barring failure obv.)? Typical generation is 5-7 years.

Generation yes but I don't remember a whole lot of fidelity updates occurring to my xbox 360 or my xbox one past the first couple years is what I was trying to say. Where as my NVIDIA cards get regular tweaks and improvements for much longer. I'm mainly a PC gamer though so I could be wrong here.

Game developers love consoles, because the hardware is known for the whole generation.

Whatever tricks your NVidia card can pull, aren't reflected on someone's else GPU card, let alone everything else on the computer.

I don't know if I care what game developers like, I do care what's better for consumers like myself though. Unless you're saying that devs being able to pull more tricks result in either better graphical fidelity or performance for the consumer, otherwise I don't really think what you said contradicts my point.

Anyone is free to chose what they think is best for themselves, game consoles culture is not the same as PCs.

Additionally, game development culture is definitely not in line with the FOSS culture that is usually discussed in sites like HN.

>the cost of building a decent gaming computer has become ridiculous

I don't know, I have a GTX 980ti and an overclocked Sandybridge Core i7 2600k in my gaming computer, both bought many years ago, and I haven't had any problem playing new games. I'm sure there may be some stuff it would struggle with but Doom Eternal, the latest Deus Ex, Far Cry 5, etc. play perfectly well as far as I can tell.

There's some cards which lasted a while (1080 Ti, or the Titan cards, probably the high end 3x series and AMD's equivalent), but consoles are made obsolete pretty regularly. It's more worthwhile if you haven't already bought a work/life non-gaming PC though or need to upgrade that. If you don't have a good TV for the console, that might be an additional cost.

Can't beat the ergonomics of chilling on your couch with a controller, but you could set that up with a PC if you really wanted to.

I've always been a PC gamer, on Linux mostly (Steam enables so much).

After enjoying a SNES mini for a while, I considered maybe it could simplify life by getting a dedicated modern console rather than use PC, for playing the latest games.

However, then reading about how modern consoles are online connected and let you wait while they auto-download updates, makes it look exactly like PC, so not adding any value. So PC gamer I stay :)

>> so not adding any value.

Adding nothing and removing much. I have yet to see a console that can handle mods properly. There is no greater sin for a console developer than to allowing the player to edit game files. That road leads to cheating and piracy. I don't think Minecraft would have become what it did without mods, without the creativity displayed by PC gamers.

Also, historically consoles promised high quality technical experience - no major bugs and consistent high FPS, while currently it's no longer guaranteed. It's basically PC gaming without the hassle of GPU driver incompatibilities.

When was that? I spent quite a bit of time on PS1, then PS3, and then PS4, and enjoyed my share of that sweet 24 FPS "cinematic" experience. That heavy post-processing as an attempt to hide the (sometimes extremely) low texture resolution. The atrocious load times.

Never again.

The pre-3d era (SNES etc.) was perfect. Meanwhile on PC you were fighting IRQ conflicts and HIMEM.SYS etc.

The good news is that you have about 3 decades worth of great games (1990 to 2020 roughly) to enjoy for the rest of your life

Totally agree with this. There are a huge number of good old games with great re-playability. There are lots of great new games too, but sometimes it is worth diving into the old stuff to find an oldie-but-goodie. I played Gothic 2 for the first time a couple years ago and loved it.

Long live the nameless hero fellow Piranha Bytes customer!

They say in the article:

> For Xbox this coming generation is about "going beyond the console," as Ahmad says, "and really trying to reach as many people on mobile and PC" as possible.

ugh

I have nothing but good things to say about the Xbox game pass but I absolutely loathe the recent push for Xbox (and even Steam) to become some sort of social media platform. Sure, sometimes its fun to play with friends but quite often I just want to be left alone while I play and recently that seems to be (intentionally) more and more difficult.

All products evolve to contain a social network, or are replaced by those that can.

Newell's corollary to Zawinski's Law?

You really don't see the benefit of paying USA $60 to rent 24 high quality games a year indefinitely? I mean really? thats almost a $1000 value.

I mean literally, you will get more games (and AAA ones too) for pennies. I have PS plus, and they throw games at you. It's a problem because it probably suppresses people's desire to buy new games; like why buy control at launch when chances are it hits plus later?

I agree here, everyone seems to just be on some rabid rampage talking about the if's, what's and maybe's.

I couldn't access my Xbox for 2 months, I got it setup over the weekend. Downloaded 5 new games thanks to Game Pass, there's a lot more there as well but I need to play them and all for basically nothing.

Netflix - everyone pays $5 per month for the pleasure of scrolling. Add in Amazon, Hulu and everything else and you have over $50 worth of scrolling to do to watch the same movies and TV shows that was watched many times over.

People on these forums just can't fathom the idea that they aren't the "average" consumer. They think because game passes don't make sense for THEM, that it's a bad idea.

Therefore any decision made by game developers are awful, they are all idiots, people who spend time on niche tech/gaming forums are all geniuses who understand their market better etc. etc.

Yeah, to be fair you are right. It's amazing when you speak to non-tech people about some of the subjects discussed in HN and they honestly wouldn't care or know what anything is about.

Never miss a chance to namedrop that infamous Dropbox comment.

My son only plays same 3 games but I have to get the Plus for the online features. I think you are lucky if you enjoy 20% of the games on the Plus offer that you do not already own. If they really want my money each month then OK, fine but let me chose(put my money in the wallet and I buy what I want or put a giant list of games so I have some kind of choice).

to be fair, they are making this change somewhat. on PS5, Ps Plus members have access to the “PS Plus Collection” which is I believe 15-20 of the best PS4 games, and one free PS5 game a month in addition to the usual PS Plus offerings.

I did not researched the PS5 collection so maybe that is worth it. The thing that really irritates me a lot is that Sony made Plus required for multiplayer and it was not like that in the PS3 days, so it is a downgrade in my opinion. But because my son spends his time in games like Little Big Planet and recently Dreams I can't consider an xbox or PC.

Also if you are a fan of Tomb Raider , Final Fantasy or other good game you will buy it and not wait years for it to appear on Plus.

Why would I give a hoot about that $1000 value. It only exists in the heads of corporate people who are trying to hook me up. The only thing that matters to me would be do I like games X,Y,Z and how much am I willing to pay for it.

You pay less with plus for most of the games. Like I paid $60 for the PS4 Final Fantasy 7 remake, when I could have waited and paid what works out to be $2. They threw it on PS plus. Like I literally at one point got 6 games a month from it, since they gave them away for ps3, ps4, and ps vita. You literally pay the cost of one AAA game to get access to 24 for a year or more.

If you think it's not a value, you're mistaken.

If you're the kind of person who wants to play the entire PlayStation catalog, I can see the value. For me, I paid for PS plus just to play Battlefield One. I downloaded the plus games every month (when I remembered to) and most of them didn't really interest me (e.g. Just Cause and Batman I just didn't enjoy after giving them a shot).

Looking at my PS Plus library.

Read only 2064 memories

Amnesia Collection

Absolver

All three Bioshock games

Bloodborne

Cities: Skyline

Conan Exiles

Control

Day of the Tentacle

Dead by Daylight

Fall Guys

God of war 3

Guacamelee

Metal Gear Solid V

Nioh

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Soma

Uncharted 4

What remains of edith finch

Yakuza Kiwami

If I wasnt already conditioned to buy physical games i'd legit not need to buy one ever. It's not like they throw junk at you.

Every game I’ve played on this list is amazing. I could add a few more if I booted my console.

I understand the frustration of having to pay to play online, but Sony has definitely made great steps towards making PS Plus a value beyond that.

>"If you think it's not a value, you're mistaken."

I am not mistaken. I do what I want how I want where possible and that alone is of great value to me. And they would not be squeezing me later when they think that there are enough people on the hook and the alternatives are few so lets raise the price.

What value is gained from being forced to pay for internet access that you've already paid for? What value comes from owning $1000 worth of games I don't care about?

The value is what you make of it. For me, its worth it. For you, only you can tell.

It's not my job to convince haters to like something, but at the same time, just because you don't enjoy it doesn't mean that millions can't either.

For many of us, Xbox Game Pass is a serious bargain. Going forward we don't need to buy Microsoft studio titles, which the game pass makes super affordable and as for historical games, having 100s to play on Xbox or PC is super nice.

> $1000 value

No, it's $60 value. That's what you paid for it, that's what it's worth. You cannot compare it to a different ownership model, because that is not a fair comparison.

How much did your PC cost? What games do you play?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com