Nice article, but I feel you missed some of the good sides to console gaming. First off, while a base PC setup is favorable over a console at launch, you failed to acknowledge that in order to get the absolute best out of your games, you WILL need to upgrade. Sure, you can circumvent this by lowering a few settings, but that's something console gamers don't have to deal with.
Every piece of software a console owner buys is running the best the system can handle, at full settings. 5 years down the line, it'll still run perfectly. I wish I could say the same about the PC I built in 2004. Sure it'll run Crysis, but at it's absolute best, giving me the "real" Crysis experience? No. Physics will have to be cut. Resolution. Lighting. Texture detail. AA. Water detail. Shadows. The game will become a shadow of it's former self, a far cry from the screenshots and video I drooled over for months.
I could go into why directly comparing specs is a bit unfair (point: consoles are built with simply gaming in mind, whereas PCs are built for multitasking and running several things BEHIND your games, the reason why an Xbox can handle Doom 3 with only 64 megs of unified RAM when a PC definetly CANNOT) but this is an article about cost.
For a good comparison, when I saw Gears of War two years ago, it looked great. It looked even better upon it's release.When I play it in 1920x1084 on my LCD, it looks phenomenal.
A good estimate of how much it cost me total? About $500. Just counting the game and the system.
Now imagine just how much I'd have to spend on a rig to get it to run Gears the SAME way the 360 does.
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