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Comment by cgrealy | Hacker News Reader

Hard to say.

There are all kinds of factors at play here, none of which I have any concrete data on.

First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users. However, a percentage (not a majority, but certainly significant) of those would be kids whose parents buy them one or two games a year.

OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC). Plus, steam sales come up all the time and lots of PC gamers have massive libraries of games they bought cheap and never played.

All of these (sometimes conflicting) factors make it hard to tell who spends more.

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A very tiny percentage of PC gamers have the kind of rigs you are envisioning. According to Steam's data (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...), the most common GPU in use is the GTX 1060, which was the entry level Nvidia card released in 2016. Most gamers have a <2.7Ghz processor and are on a 1080p screen.

Mostly because crypto idiots abused them to run hashing functions on pseudorandom numbers in hopes of winning the script kiddie lotto.

I believe the 3060 has taken the 1060's crown: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-rtx-3060-begins-its...

Especially once we take into account that the "1060" is actually a merging of multiple 1060 SKUs (including mobile) with pretty different performance

Another reading of that data is that about half of gamers are on laptops and the other half upgrade their GPUs every 5-6 years.

> A very tiny percentage of PC gamers have the kind of rigs you are envisioning.

I'm not talking about the people buying i7s and 4090s. 100% agree they are a tiny minority. I'm talking about the same modest setups you are.

Even a 1060 (or it's modern equivalent) with an i3 and a 24 inch 1080p panel is more expensive than a PS5/Xbox. And I think it's becoming increasing rare for a family to have a desktop pc unless it's for gaming.

> First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users.

> OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC).

If we're talking about on average it's probably the exact reverse of this. I'd be surprised if more than 25% of Steam users were in North America. Not because Steam isn't huge in NA, but because getting a console and games is way harder in most other countries than running what you can on the family PC.

For example (at least before the sanctions) Russia makes up the largest portion of CS:GO and DOTA2 players. At least for DOTA2 it's more then double the number of American players.

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