Comment on Asus and Lenovo’s handhelds get price hike as Valve pauses some Steam Deck sales
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days agoA handheld PC isn’t cheaper to buy, and most console gamers aren’t buying a ton of games either (like PC gamers do), so the total cost of ownership for a switch 2 probably still stays under the total cost of ownership for a handheld PC.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Wait, what?
First of all, PC gamers don’t buy a ton of games.
PC is the number one piracy platform for starters, seeing as it requires no jailbreaks and the like.
Secondly, PC gamers tend to own a lot of games legitimately because our gaming library doesn’t expire with a console generation, and because our steam libraries consist of many many indie games that cost a few bucks each, not a few $50 AAA releases.
My steam library is about 435-ish games. But that’s since 2013.
The total value of the account per steamdb is like £1080, this is a vast over-estimate because I used to live in a country where the entire GTA series before 5 cost £0.20, but let’s go with £1080.
If I bought £1080 worth of standard £60 games, I’d only have 18 games. That’s actually less than I even had for the PS Vita, and most people would be surprised to know that platform even has that many games.
Between the online fees and subscriptions to PS Plus etc., lacking discounts compared to steam, and the inability to pirate even an extremely high end PC tends to be far, far cheaper in the long run than a console, especially since it also doubles as the TV, the music player, the work and hobby computer, etc etc.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Never heard of a steam backlog? PC is the number one piracy platform, but it’s also the only platform where people buy whole bundles of games in a sale or where you get at least one game for free every week.
Have a look at Nintendos sales figures: www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/…/index.html
Take for example the switch: 152 mio devices sold, vs 1391 mio units of software sold. That’s roughly 9 titles per device since 2017, or roughly one game per year.
Compare that to your 435 titles over 12 years, which equals roughly 36 titles per year.
You are a heavy buyer of games, in the order of 36x of what’s the average for a switch user. You just proved my point.
Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Yes, I’m a heavy buyer of games, but those games cost £12 on average, not £60, nor anywhere near to that amount, even if it’s lower due to the few indie games that get console releases.
€540 for those 9 games is roughly more than half of what I spent in the last decade on 430-ish PC games. It’s literally why I even have more games in the first place.
So even though I have more games on paper, I don’t spend more paper, capische?
And I certainly don’t spend more per game than the switch user, which makes your claim misleading.
In fact the opposite is true and most PC gamers are notoriously stringent in spending on games.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You are fighting windmills, capische?
You made up an argument that I never made and now you are fighting against it.
Well done, Don Quijote, the windmill is destroyed and you can go home claiming you defended the land from evil giants.