We do have fairly high prices. BUT as a Romanian, I can at least say that we have the second fastest internet connections on averege on the globe   And for peanuts too

good, I'm not a fan of consoles unless they do something unique and different. otherwise I'd rather just play my games on PC

you console peasants need to get on our level

Yeah, the US is too stupid big as one country, I wish we all had fiber everywhere here, but ATT, being a corporation as they are, won't activate most of them even though they own pretty much all of them across the country. I mean it's so bad in the States that some people in rural areas are just now getting shitty satellite internet lol. Gotta be in major cities or more populated areas or you are screwed with internet here. How are the console prices in Europe BTW? About the same as the US or higher? It's hard to make a comparison unless we have numbers from different regions and that really changes things. In the US, it's currently better to just get a PC because the prices are good if you know how to hunt for parts and use old Windows licenses to upgrade to Windows 10, I don't know how it compares to the rest of the world though.

Pretty overpriced, unfortunatly. Last year I was hunting for a 3DS XL and new, it was almost 300$.

At the current exchange rate the 1TB PS4 is ~ 450$ while the 500GB is ~ 400$. The PS3 is ~ 210$. The Xone is ~ the same price ( a bit more expensive the 1TB model) as the PS4, and games are ~ 5$ more expensive then in the rest of the world. And keep in mind, we are talking about a country that is still strugling to reach the 600$ avrege monthly income, a value that is extremely sqewed.

So yeah, we are fucked when it comes to gaming. Everything is overpirced. Luckily, piracy is pretty much accepted as standard, and never in my life have I seen a crackdown, since the bootleg CD period, when only people who had on them thousands of pirated software ready for sale, would be rarely caught. I think I am one of the few people who I know who actually buys games fromn the store, but slowly people are starting to open up their wallets.

Edit: price typo.

PS: If Im lucky this year I might finally buy a new 3DS XL at 230$ new...

There are a number of components being left out of those builds tho, I mean even if most people will just use it to install the operating system, it can still be nice to have a dvd or BR drive for installing stuff from, the lack of keyboard/mouse for gaming I find strange, no fans in that "next gen crusher" that isn't going to run cold with those parts trying to push out 1080p 60fps and the suggestion of waiting for a free OS, waiting for games to work with Linux or pirating windows are not realistic or legal ways to lower the price of what you're suggesting to use for gaming.

Also the " sit down with your console controller of choice," so for this you also need to already have bought a €50 Xbox or ps3/4 controller? Fair enough, I mean on paper having a lot of powerful parts in a box is great, but without the means to control it in any way shape or form is really a hard sell, I'm sure if you were to compare the out of the box performance of a console without an OS and the PC without an OS they'd both be pretty neck and neck alright.

I'm not saying that PC gaming can't be cheap and the notion that it has to be 2k or the highway in terms of builds is a joke, even with parts like SSD's now prices are dropping like a stone all the time, but still a bunch of pieces which are not going to end up with a running PC you can actually boot, can't compare to a out of the box console. That console will run, a PC missing parts and OS wont, end of comparison.

Dang O_O;

@every post in this thread

First off comparing the PC industry to that of consoles is like comparing the New York Night Club buisness to the New York stock exchange. Only the gaming part of the PC industry matters.

Second of all until Nvidia releases that pushing specs is idiotic should not be priority because it further disparates the market and should instead focus on quality at a low price to encourage a greater base. Until something like that happens, it doesn't matter how fast the PC "Gaming" industry grows, it wont address the reasons as to why consoles exist in the first place.

/thread

Correct me if 'm but aren't games on ps4/x1 running mostly on medium with high settings.

and imo you should update your cpu. 

Shadow of mordors "minimum" req is i5 750 

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-750-vs-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-860K/2773vs3265

witcher 3 - again minimum i5 2500k (your already below minimum)

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-860K/619vs3265

mgs 5 - i5 4460 (again already below minimun)

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-4460-vs-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-860K/2310vs3265

Imo If you want to run games that will be released 4-5 yrs  from now without a problem,  you should get a better cpu...

That is because of background process that need to be ran on PC that doesn't need to be on console. Also, layer that program runs on is much higher on PC than Console, making it slower. (Priorities.)

In addition to those, they need to cut back the code that makes game faster, since there is no guarantee that CPU, GPU or operating system would be supporting required instruction set or library.

Yes, building serious gamimg rig will probably take more than 700$ still. But slow and steady wins the race. Modern CPU have catched up enough to the point where they can run most of the game with intergrated graphic. Some people are happy just playing Binding of Issac after all.

And mobile gaming has outgrown both, but that doesn't mean much to most traditional gamers. So talking about it is moot. The same goes for the facts in your OP. They don't mean much to most of us.

Why would that kind of growth mean anything when it is largely due to games most of us don't care about, and in many cases, can't even play?