I don't know why people always assume you have to have a high end pc. Yes if you want to play the latest ultra demanding games with the best graphics at 4K then yes you need a super expensive rig but surely the whole point of PC is there are PCs at every price level and the cheaper you go the lower resolution you play with less detail in the graphics. I paid £130 for a mini pc based on a Ryzen 7 5700U from aliexpress. It's about 9x the cpu performance of Switch 2 and has a GPU gflops of about 2 Teraflops. Nothing amazing but decent enough for a lot of games and it plays emulators well up to 4K Switch etc. It's only consuming about 15-25W and based on a laptop chipset but not thermally or power throttled because of better cooling and no battery of course. There are no online costs and many free games like Epic weekly free games plus other games are incredibly cheap compared to console. I've had my steam account for what seems like 20 years and can still play the games I first bought on steam at the beginning. I consider PC gaming incredibly cheap but then I don't tend to go for top end pc hardware just hardware good enough to run the games I want to play. The phrase 'Diminishing Returns' comes to mind where you can pay huge sums of money but are only getting marginally improvements. I've seen videos online where people have taken an old PC off a skip and stuck in a graphics card like a RX 580 purchased cheaply from ebay for £40 and they are having a great experience pretty much playing the latest most demanding games albeit at 720p with very low detail levels. Older games look great. RX 580 has about 5-6 Teraflops of GPU power, more than some entry level gaming laptops you can buy today. An old i5 chip from a LGA1155 motherboard is still delivering 6000 or more CPU passmark score, that's 3x the CPU performance of the Switch 2.
You can get into PC gaming pretty much for nothing with a pc from freecycle to maybe £10k if you want the very best rig available or anywhere in-between. I guess the real debate is where is the sweet spot for value and what configuration of PC you want. I had a conversation with someone the other day who had never played a single PC game on a desktop PC. He has always had laptops and I guess mid-range laptops, sometimes discrete graphics and sometimes mid-level IGPUs but has been happy gaming on those. There are about 2 billion PC gamers in the world according to recent estimates. Hence the huge economies of scale and ultra competitive pricing of game software. People owning high end rigs are probably a tiny minority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19dMQILFQ-o
