I didn't really think they'd go below $300 anytime soon anyway, but this pretty clearly shows that it'll take even longer than I thought. This is really interesting. I must be missing something, because I'm rather surprised no one has talked about this sooner, as it has some big implications for the future of the industry. Consoles might last longer than I thought, if they can differentiate themselves from PCs. At the same time though...the whole industry will suffer.

I don't know enough about computer architecture to say for sure, but you explained it pretty well and it seems right. My biggest question is why haven't we heard more people talking about this? Seems pretty important, actually.

I'm curious, what do you think of this? You say affordable PC gaming rigs won't be all that much better than consoles in the future. So uh...what happens next then? With gaming consoles getting more non-gaming features with each passing generation, do consoles just become glorified PCs with some exclusive IPs (they arguably are already, but in past gens they were more limited to gaming unlike PCs)? If they do end up as glorified PCs, will it all just become an IP war? Would either consoles or PC fade out of popularity as a result? Maybe I'm just speculating wildly and not thinking this through, but it seems there'd be significant consequences for the industry if consoles started becoming comparable to PCs.

@Bold The gaming community is ignorant about this stuff anyways so I didn't expect much from them but the PC hardware community isn't as clueless. There's not a whole lot of people that put a whole lot of investments in knowing about semiconductor foundries and chip manufacturing. You'll see tons of gamers arguing about semantics such different architectures of a system yet we rarely see them making an argument about physical aspects of a chip such as power consumption or minimum feature sizes for a transistor which are just as important if not more so than they think. 

It does indeed have some big implications in the future. PC gamers won't getting a whole lot of improvements in the performance for price department seeing as we've figured that it could potentially cost more to manufacture chips using newer process node. These current gen consoles could potentially last for about 10 years as 13.5nm EUVL isn't coming anytime soon and were stuck with the icky 193nm immersion technology. 

http://semiengineering.com/euv-reaches-a-crossroads/

It's got very little to do with computer engineering. This is more on the lines of material science and somewhat about electrical engineering. 

I don't know if consoles still have their unique identity but time will tell us all that. PC's will assuredly still exist but I don't know how it will end up for consoles in general. Sales will tell us if Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft made the right call. 

If anything the only consequences I can see is that PC hardware sales will start staggnating in the somewhat distant future ...

Take a look at this and realize that $400 is NOT a lot of money for a console!

http://kotaku.com/36-years-of-console-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1485353267

Thats right folks, people were paying $400 (in equivalent dollars) for a NES or PS1!

Has our wages increased significantly though ? 

Enough to compensate for inflation...but the relative amounts that you paid vs your annual income is almost identical.

Yeah, lets face it, if the gaming industry were a college campus, the console gamers would be the arts and humanities majors, while the PC gamers would be the hard science majors. So then, does all this basically mean at least a temporary end to the effects of Moore's law and that all these gamers that seem to think we'll see PS5/Nextbox by 2018 are full of shit?

No because even at the same node process, prices will continue to fall as more and more chips are made.

I dont think any of the two needs it. Especially the PS4.