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That's one thing. The other is price. Consoles can be sold at a loss, particularly early in their 10-year cycle, when early on the loss is high, but close to the end of the cycle the loss is minimal, and so they appear much cheaper.
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Given recent price rises for console hardware I think they're struggling with that too though. The model doesn't work as well if the components get more expensive over time and not less?
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But PC parts are also getting more expensive, so the difference is still there.
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Yeah I mean specifically the "sell at a loss, wait for costs to get lower over the generation" thing. if it's at a loss at the start of the generation and component costs only rise, it'll still sell for a loss at the end but also it'll be more expensive for customers. this puts the company in a hard position. a lot of gamers are also used to waiting until the end of the life of a console and getting games used, which might no longer be an option
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Oh, for sure! It's not getting any better with PC part prices lately either...

I've never considered that my old 360 was probably sold at a loss, knowing I'd buy LIVE and all the games they take a cut/license fee off of, but that makes complete sense to me

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This cycle is different. Prices have increased for both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles and no higher efficiency versions have been released (ala the PS3, X360).
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Sony released the PS5 Slim earlier this cycle.
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Isn’t PS5 Pro a higher efficiency version?
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No, it's a more powerful version.
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During college, before I switched to linux, the DRM packaged with Spore bricked my computer in the middle of a semester. That's what turned me off of PC gaming.
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This is a nitpick, but "to brick" means that hardware becomes totally unusable, like an expensive brick. You turn it on, and it does nothing. I'm going to assume that this is not what you meant, and that the OS just got hosed, requiring a reinstallation.
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That's unfortunate and infuriating I'm sure
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This is also why Steam hardware matters.

If something runs on a Steam Deck, you can be sure it will run on your >= Steam Deck-equivalent device.

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"Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world"

Let me tell you, as someone that repairs a TON of XBox 360s, this comment is very, VERY wrong. The GPU isn't even the same revision between the same batch runs. Did you get Xenos? Zeus? Jupiter? That determined one set of things needed for install/refurbish. Is that a Valhalla motherboard in your hands? That just limited you to a very narrow and specific set of hardware you could utilize.

Oh and performance between all of those models varied WILDLY. Silicon lottery is a fucking JOKE on the XBox 360.

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I'm not trying to disagree with you, I'm not too knowledgeable in this field. Even assuming what you said is true, I don't think it aligns with the public image of consoles. The general non-technical gamer doesn't know the difference.
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There's a ton of differences that matter to refurbishing, no doubt. Different eMMCs, different chips on the board, different cooling needs, different board layouts, different ports, and more.

What really mattered to end users though was "this disc says Xbox 360. Can I put it in the box at home that says Xbox 360 and have the game run properly?" This didn't really matter if it was a Jasper motherboard or not. The game ran practically the same from a user perspective regardless of which board revision you had. I can go pick up any generation of 360 that still powers on and any 360 game off the shelf and it'll work pretty much how the developer intended.

Meanwhile, if you don't really know anything about computer specs, who knows if a game will run on your computer? This was a $3,000 gaming PC, it should run anything! I bought it in 2002 though, is that a problem? The Radeon 9700 Pro from that red GPU company, probably better than that Radeon RX9070 right? Bigger number and all, and after all its Pro. And its got 128 MEGA bytes, probably better than that other card's 16 something or other.

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> It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.

It used to be a selling point of console indeed, however nowadays console are separated by Pro/Non-pro, different revisions and you aren't really guaranteed on how well your game is going to run unless you watch a Youtube let's play of the game you want.

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