I guess there's a point buried somewhere in there? You not only first had to buy the initial computer (which probably cost a bit more than a 360), but decent graphics cards cost between $250 - $500. Then there's the hard drive, but that could have been anywhere between $30 - $150. It actually is less money to game on a console, unless you pirate every PC game you play.
Consoles are infinitely more user friendly. RRoD sucks, but there are way more issues that can go wrong with a PC, and the general public is not computer savvy enough to figure out the issues on their own, so they usually either take them to a shop to get fixed, or just buy a new one.
The funny thing about the "pirating crisis" though is that a) more people own a PC than they do X or Y console but b) console games seem to be catching up or exceeding the amount of copies being taken per title and they are getting new releases faster than the PC are now in this way (thanks to DRM and other crap). Doing away with PC gaming because of pirating won't stop shit. If anything, people will just buy a secondary system to play their library of 200 burnt console games.
Wat.
A "decent" graphics card will land you about 150 bucks max. A "nice" graphics card will cost you about $200, and a top of the line graphics card will cost you no more than $250-300. Also, you should know that you can play every single game with all these cards, it's just the lower ends may not be able to run AA and Anisotropic Filtering at max settings and still get 60 fps. You have to tweak them a bit.
If you're paying more than $250 for a graphics card, you're probably buying those cards that are completely unusable for the first three years due to no software being able to fully utilize them. Gamers who buy those cards are usually buying them because they're the most expensive, so they think they're the best. This could not be further from the truth. Half of the time people don't even know the difference because all they care about is frames per second. Well, you can get a last generation GeForce 460 for about 120 bucks and it will run Skyrim while riding a unicycle and juggling three flaming bowling pins. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's good or will even work properly.
I don't think anyone here advocating PCs is so dense as to believe that the initial cost of a PC is less than a console. It's like Max said: it's an investment. You DO realize you can do more things than play games on a computer, right? You can record music, watch movies, do all your internetz, use it for photo/film editing, etc.
John likes to record his music. If he were to get a decent PC for around $600, he could utilize all these features and still play all the games he loves. That's what we're saying. Sure, you can splurge on an Xbox 360 for 200 bucks and then play ONE video game, Skyrim, and then it just becomes one big paperweight, or you can save up a bit and make a solid investment in something you'll have for literally years to come.
Xbox games are anywhere between 35 to 50 bucks a pop. A person who buys a console has the intention of buying more than just one video game. Before you know it, you've got a collection of 10 games. Those ten games could've been an extra $300-$400 bucks gone towards your computer, which by that time you would've already had had you saved your money from the beginning.
Consoles ARE NOT user friendly, at least in terms of gameplay and control. This isn't PS2 where you pop in the disc and it plays. Now you have bugs, patches, installs, uninstalls, defrags, etc., just like with a PC. Oh, and consoles also have HARD DRIVES with which to do these installs, uninstalls, and defrags, and you know what? They die just as often as they die in a PC, sometimes even more. So let's look at what we have:
A PC has a video card, cooling system, OS, sound card (if it's not integrated) and a hard drive. A console actually has multiple video cards/processors, its own (often faulty) cooling system, its own OS, and its own hard drive. Not only that, all those components notoriously fail many times more often than those of a PC.
I'm running a dual core 3 gig machine with 3 gigs of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 450 GS video card, and an old Soundblaster Audigy audio card I bought from a friend for 15 bucks in my PC. WITH WINDOWS XP. I can play just about any game out there just fine aside from BF3, and that's why I have a PS3. This year I'm buying a new PC after the summer and this one will just be passed down to my wife who doesn't game anymore and her laptop will be a permanent fixture in the living room. I have to save up for it because I've got other bills to pay first, but it's an investment and I'd MUCH rather invest in a PC than impulse buy an Xbox.
