Putting the PC cost argument to rest

[fps_d0minat0r]

If you want to game as well as you can on a console, on a PC throughout the gen, $400/£350 isnt going to do it.
And I've been monitoring humble bundles, its more expensive than PS+.

For example, at the moment, you have to pay $7.96 for bioshock 2, mafia II and spec ops the line, and another $20 for xcom and bioshock infinite. in pounds, that £16.34 which is over 6 months worth of PS+ in which you would get 36 games. Furthermore, on PS+ we had those games when they were newer and cost much more than they do now, which makes it a better deal than this humble bundle. It was the same case with the last big humble bundle which was supposed to be a steal (the EA one).

Now since you havent made a saving, it doesnt make sense that you somehow put those 'savings' towards a GPU upgrade.... and even if you did, it doesnt make sense to go through the effort just to maintain a PC to remain on par with consoles.

"And after that, you will never have to truly rebuy a new PC. Things like the HDD, case, fan, etc. can be reused for a relatively long time, or at least until they get too worn out."
Yeah but if anyone is upgrading RAM, processor, GPU for a new gen, they are not going to use ancient cases and fans.

$200 saving per year.... wow... just wow.
All you have proven is everything that is wrong with the PC's are cost efficient as consoles argument.

Its impossible and the reason its impossible is because when you buy PC parts, theres more intermediaries looking for a cut of the profit, whereas Sony MS and nintendo are mainly in the console business for software revenue. They have no problem selling consoles for no profit, or even at a loss because they can make the money back on software sales. Retailers are also happy to work on low margins because they know the more people that have consoles, the more games they can sell.

PC hardware manufacturers and retailers are not going to sell you cheap stuff because thats what they are built on, and retailers are not going to sell it off cheap expecting people to buy physical PC games from them because hardly anyone does.

Lastly, even if you were able to buy PC components comparable to console parts at the same price, its a well known fact that consoles get far more optimisation throughout the generation than PC hardware does. For companies like Nvidia and AMD, they want to promote how awesome their new GPU's are with specially optimised games which is cool, but a year later, they wont give a damn, they will have moved on.
On the other hand, console manufacturers continuously, until the last game they make, find ways to optimise their games for their machines. Console games get better with time. PC games deteriorate with time.