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Zippy6 on 17 November 2025
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Kyuu said:
Otter said:

To be expected honestly, I mean you don't reach 150m+ steam users through tech enthusiasts who spend $1000 every 6 years on new hardware

Most gamers on any platform are casual users who play a few experiences a year, they're probably not on forums and are likely more interested in generational leaps versus incremental quality settings that most hardware upgrades achieve.

Yeah, but I think typically the majority of active PC gamers will upgrade to hardware better than an old console by its 4th year. The transition has been slower this generation on both PC and consoles (where tens of millions of PS4 players refuse to upgrade).

I'm a PC gamer myself (dropped PS4 after Sekiro) with a build much weaker than a PS5, but still decent-ish for most games that I care about.

Looked at steam hardware survey for October 2018 Vs 2025 to compare.

I'd say that in 2018 roughly 43% of steam users had a better GPU than the PS4, and in 2025 about 37% have one better than the PS5. So definitely a decline in how fast the average Steam user catches up to console spec, though not a massive one.

Probably down to A. The apocalyptic GPU prices we had for a year during COVID, and B. The consoles this generation were much more competitive to current pc tech.

The PS4 was most similar to a Radeon 7850. A $250 GPU that was released over 1.5 years before the PS4.

Whereas PS5 got RDNA2 just before  the first PC card launched, and it's closest pc equivalent launched almost a year later at $380.