Japanese gamers have continued to embrace the PC as a platform at staggering rates, jumping up 43% from 131.3 billion yen to 189.2 billion yen in 2022. That’s a total size of about $1.3 billion US. The data comes from the latest report by Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories, an industry think tank which compiles yearly material about the performance of the gaming industry in Japan and abroad.
For comparison various analysts peg growth rates in the US PC Gaming market at between 1-2% in 2022, on a market of something like $9-10 billion, as growth stabilizes following a boom during the pandemic. The global gaming market as a whole actually shrunk in 2022—for the same reason.
A post-pandemic drop that, it should be noted, didn’t slow down Japanese PC gaming much at all. It’s another year of data proving that though conventional wisdom once said PC Gaming in Japan was niche, it ain’t niche anymore. Japanese gamers are joining the rest of Asia demographically, where PC gaming is by far the largest segment of the hardcore or hobby gaming market. (Mobile gaming, of course, outstrips everything else everywhere.)
That’s not my experience. I get much better performance at higher resolutions on my PS5 than I do on my 2.5x more expensive PC.
To get a little closer in performance, the GPU alone would have to be more expensive than the whole console.
You can make near-equivalent builds at a similar price, this one for example. And this is with new parts, if you buy used the skies the limit.
That build is at $530 with discounts. Add $70 for a DualSense 2 and it’s $600.
A Digital PS5 retail is $500, so the PC here is 20% more expensive. If you get the PS5 on a discount (the compared PC is discounted), the difference could go up to about 40%.
On top of that, I guarantee you that its real world performance is not on par to that of a PS5. My own PC has better RAM, better CPU, better GPU and better SSD and it’s still not quite there.
Again, to get comparative real world performance you’ll need to spend at least as much as the console on the GPU alone.
Well that’s why I said “near-equivalent”, $600 vs $450 is comparable. Performance should be close to equal, I don’t know what’s going on with your particular setup but if your PC has a better CPU/GPU/SSD than a PS5… then it’s better than a PS5. Maybe you are getting throttled by some external factor, like temperature or background processes. But I suspect you are running games at full native resolution on your PC and comparing it to console games, but “4k” is never actually “4k” on a console. They often use some tricks to run at lower resolutions using upscaling. You can do the exact same thing on PC if you wish.