Gaming

Yeah the PS5 is pretty reasonably priced for what you get. I think the issue is two fold:

1. We already have really expensive machines that probably play games much better than the PS5 in frames and quality so buying another machine for a handful of games is just not in the cards.
2. Many of us much prefer keyboard/mouse and using controllers is really hard when you've not done it in many years.

I think we just wish Playstation was more friendly to PC players and not have these long exclusives (they've gotten a lot better recently though). Microsoft for example is a lot friendlier to PC players than Sony. Pretty much all MS first party games are on PC pretty much day one and many of them are on GamePass day one as well.

Just quickly checking Amazon, a 3060 will run people a little less than $300. Now, if you want the newest hardware, yeah, it's overpriced to hell and back and we've been complaining about it for about half a decade, but a 1060 6GB from 2016 still handles a vast number of games, it's what my wife runs in her build to date. In addition, games tend to cost more digitally on console because there's no competition of storefronts, whereas PC has key and bundle sites plus countless competing storefronts that want your money, or even Epic and GOG that regularly do "please use our service" game giveaways.

Either way though, nobody wants to pay an additional $400 just for the privilege of playing a handful of games. That cost is almost 6 full-priced games alone.

Games are free on PC, or at least very cheap if you insist on actually purchasing them

It's more that a PC capable of playing games is something a lot of PC gamers are going to have regardless of whether the PS5 has exclusives they want to play or not. Its something they might go onto use for stuff like Blender or video editing or any other productivity based work. So the idea of dropping the cost of a GPU just to play exclusive games is not the most enticing, since it's not hardware that is going to do anything but be able to play games.

So console are cheap to someone that will not have a device that is satisfactory for gaming, but when you already do and will the price is steep. Since at the point you may prefer to spend that money towards more PC upgrades, or buying other hardware that offers something that is lacking in your set up like nice speakers or a VR headset or headphones or just save the money.

So for a console to catch the eye of a PC gamer I think the switch has actually done the best job. It's not just another display dependent hardware that PC owners already have and will have, but something portable. It offers a unique hardware experience that makes it more alluring to buy than just gatewalled games being what makes it stand out.

Yes but also you can play almost every game out there. Many exclusives for PC exist because that's simply the platform the developer can afford. Xbox and playstation are expensive to release on and very gate keeping to what releases.

PC is also the biggest game platform. No one has an exact count of games released for it. Additionally games I bought 20 years ago still work on my PC. I have a top of the line PC with all the bells and whistles. Windows 11 still lets you run games from decades ago without updates to the game because they focus on backwards compatibility. Even if it doesn't work out of the gate there is windows compatibility mode that go back to XP built into the os.

So all of that means I have 1000 games that I purchased on steam, my kids can play and I don't need to do anything like pull out some archaic box that might have popped a cap or broken entirely. Or in the case of my nes, a format to hook up to TV's that simply doesn't exist or work without special equipment.