And to add insult to injury, they cannot even match the PC in the most important selling point for FPS: Eye candy. It will take at least 2 generations before consoles will even get close to Crysis.
But you would also need to buy a new PC that costs twice as much as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 to actually see that eyecandy*. When you buy a console, you know that you can still buy and play the newest games 3 years in the future.
I agree completely on everything else though <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />.
Well, thats the whole point: If they cannot be on the cutting edge graphics-wise, they better up their games with good gameplay. Halo 3 has many people stifling yawns because it´s just MOTS. Also, why a genre for which consoles are inherently inferior is so prevalent on them is beyond me.
Oh, and sure, you can buy the "newest" games for 3 years. Except that the "newest" games will steadily fall further and further behind technolically. So consoles do not slow the breakneck pace at which game hardware becomes obsolete at all, they merely "hide it from view".
And once the 3 years are up, no more new games are made for your console, effectively turning it into an overpriced Emulator for nostalgia-games.
And while I´ll be the first to admit that keeping up with the State of the Art on the PC will bleed you dry financially, it becomes a lot more affordable if you stick to the mid-range products. Example: If you stick a new 200€ graphics card into your PC every 2-3 years, you can play roughly 75% of games with 75% of the graphic bells&whistles turned on.
Yes, in the long run console HARDWARE will a bit less expensive. The reason for that is that the manufacturers are actually LOOSING money on the consoles themselves (with the notable exception of the Wii), which they make back via the licensing fees from 3rd party games. This is why prices for console games are so obscene; this is only a very rough estimate, but the financial "break-even" point between consoles and PCs of equal horsepower is at about 5 games.
