billeh

One that's hitting me way harder than I thought it might.

Thanks for all the good times! You've all shaped the way I think about, play, and enjoy video games over the last decade+. Not only was the content pro-consumer and informative; it was always entertaining. I'll watch Brad, Alex, and Vinny play just about anything, even if I hate the game.

Brad and Vinny working their way through Astroneer remains a highlight for me from 2020, a game I immediately bought after watching the first episode and then played alongside them. It's not the only example either.

I will sorely miss you guys; best wishes!

I appreciate Ben Pack! Thank you!

@justin258 beat me to all of this, and added more, but I spent the time to type it all up so I'm posting it anyways

I don't work in consumer electronics specifically, but I have been involved with hardware development (primarily aerospace) for nearly 10 years now, so I have some ideas to consider.

1. Some of this (perhaps more than just "some") relates to economies of scale. Sony and Microsoft are building millions of consoles - this allows them to hit price breaks on components because they are literally buying millions of them at a time. By comparison, when you build your PC, you're paying for a single CPU/GPU/SSD/etc. If you had a parts list for an Xbox and tried to go to Digikey and order just the quantities you needed to build one Xbox, I'm guessing that the cost of parts would be far higher than you might think. Potentially more than you paid for your PC.

As an arbitrary example from my world, when you buy a high reliability capacitor, you can sometimes pay $100 for one part. If you buy 10000+ of them, that price drops to far less (like 2 orders of magnitude less sometimes). This is because it's very costly for a component manufacturer to spin up a production line just to make a low quantity of devices. It's also one of the reasons that satellites and Space programs are so damn expensive. The capacitors in your PC or iPhone or whatever are worth fractions of a penny; some of the caps in the rocket engine controller I worked on were literally $40+ a piece - because they make millions of cell phones, but only 20 rocket controllers.

2. I don't know if these new consoles will have any substantial Application Specific ICs (I assume they do), but that is another area where you can get rather impressive performance gains while keeping costs low. Instead of piecing together PC components that have to be usable in a variety of configurations, you have essentially a closed box that needs to do "one thing:" play games very well. ASICs, while initially expensive to design, can provide serious performance capabilities in smaller packages that scale very well to manufacturing, usually. In a large enough market (which gaming most definitely qualifies), the cost of these ASICs becomes relatively inexpensive.

I'm sure there's more to it, but those are 2 points that I think are applicable.