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Comment by dajonker | Hacker News Reader

Convenience and cost for me. You get significantly better hardware for your money than a PC for the same price, while it is guaranteed that all games you can buy will run as the developer intended it. Just turn it on and play.

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> it is guaranteed that all games you can buy will run as the developer intended it.

Exactly. It just works and saves time. Just buy the game, plug it in and play it. Simple.

No 'swap this GPU inside step', 'installing additional drivers step' or 'incompatible hardware errors', or 'run it in 32 bit mode' etc.

And it “just works” for many years, during which games get better looking, rather than having to turn down visual quality settings like on a PC five minutes after you bought it.

Not sure how true this is, but I've heard that Sony's PlayStation division is taking a hard hit from scalping, since they sell the consoles at a loss and scalpers don't buy games. So I wonder if this trend of selling consoles at a loss will continue in future generations.

Don't the people that they resell the console onto buy games though? Possibly missing something here

It'll shake out. I'm sure that is weighted to return more later in the generation anyway.

This doesn't make sense. Unless the scalpers are hoarding consoles or using them for a purpose other than games (space heater? overpriced Netflix machine?), the consoles will get in the hands of a game buyer.

Well, paying more for the console may mean less money for games, or having wait may mean deciding on a different system or not having enough money may have the opposite effect of selling at a loss.

I've been trying to pick up a PS5 for a friend since they came out and it's been futile. I keep a watch on our local eBay and noticed there's one person who sometimes buys out all the available stock from the big electronics store, then puts them up for the MSRP. In the description they write something to the effect of "I am not making any money off of these - I just want to help people get a console for the price they normally sell for before all the scalpers buy them and mark the price up". I have no idea how they plan to prevent scalpers from buying those and charging 20% more... and also I wonder how the warranty will work since they obviously can't give you the original receipt.

Someone who pays $800 will probably buy fewer games with the console than someone who pays MSRP, so it would take longer to make back their loss.

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