PC Gaming used to be a privilege in the 1980s, where you'd need 2-3 average monthly paychecks to afford a fairly standard PC but that was because PCs were the domain of an affluent minority and still mostly seen as business machines.
10 years ago one monthly paycheck would buy you a top of the line pc (i7 with an x80ti class equivalent and 16GB RAM) and from my personal experience (I build for friends and acquaintances) it seems roughly what people are ready to spend today.
How does it work today for the same configuration?
1)Let us take the US 2019 census median household income as example now and see what happens.
Assuming one household has 2 working people (fairly close to typical) you get $65k/2 = 32,5K but this is before taxes.
2)Bing (please provide a better source if you're interested) tells me that between federal and other kind of taxation you get 29,8% in average. Let's be generous and say it's 25%. This gives us roughly $24k per year or $2k per month.
3) Using PC part picker (which is fairly optimistic about prices!) we get roughly $2k for an i7, rtx 3080ti and 32GB 3200 ram with the cheapest components (aside PSU but that's a small part) before shipping and taxes, let's add 6,35% average US sales tax to that and we seem to get about 107% of a paycheck but this is a best case with someone able to self assembly a PC (so a minority)
4) If you go to Amazon USA the closest configuration to this I could find is $2300 (downgrading to a regular 3080!) plus shipping & taxes, let's assume 6,35% and $30 shipping: we get roughly $2500 or 124% of a median US salary.
By this criteria, provided the conditions posted above (which are still better than big box stores!) you're already asking at least half of your market to shell more than they are likely to be comfortable with or they will likely buy below those specs.
This gives us half of the western market, now let's take the same process to the other half:
1) Average income in EU is about €18k and I'll take Italy as example up ahead as it's fairly close to the median in both income and taxes not to mention what I'm mostly familiar with
2) At this amount, the average taxation is roughly 27% which means about €13k per year, or roughly 1100€ per month (Italian posters may or may not disagree but I'm going with Eurostat sources here).
3) A ready PC of the configuration described earlier will cost you approximately 2400€ in the very best case I could find (on sale) or roughly 220% of the median paycheck! Self assembly might save a little money but the savings aren't huge (roughly 10%).
By this, I'm extremely confident more than half the potential EU market will either skip this gen or buy far lower specs than a typical "good" gaming PC would be.
I won't even try to do calculations for today's top (i9 and x90 class) specs but I'm fairly sure this gets closer to top 10% incomes.
Do you know what the net effect of this is? People entirely skipping GPUs to get a Ryzen 5700g (a regression from even Pascal levels!), buying 2nd hand last gen or getting by with either laptops, older hardware or game streaming.
I earn closer to the US median than the EU median yet as someone who has been in PC gaming for over 30 years I'd rather keep getting by with 10 years old hardware supported by a RX 590 than being mugged by either player!
10 years ago one monthly paycheck would buy you a top of the line pc (i7 with an x80ti class equivalent and 16GB RAM) and from my personal experience (I build for friends and acquaintances) it seems roughly what people are ready to spend today.
How does it work today for the same configuration?
1)Let us take the US 2019 census median household income as example now and see what happens.
Assuming one household has 2 working people (fairly close to typical) you get $65k/2 = 32,5K but this is before taxes.
2)Bing (please provide a better source if you're interested) tells me that between federal and other kind of taxation you get 29,8% in average. Let's be generous and say it's 25%. This gives us roughly $24k per year or $2k per month.
3) Using PC part picker (which is fairly optimistic about prices!) we get roughly $2k for an i7, rtx 3080ti and 32GB 3200 ram with the cheapest components (aside PSU but that's a small part) before shipping and taxes, let's add 6,35% average US sales tax to that and we seem to get about 107% of a paycheck but this is a best case with someone able to self assembly a PC (so a minority)
4) If you go to Amazon USA the closest configuration to this I could find is $2300 (downgrading to a regular 3080!) plus shipping & taxes, let's assume 6,35% and $30 shipping: we get roughly $2500 or 124% of a median US salary.
By this criteria, provided the conditions posted above (which are still better than big box stores!) you're already asking at least half of your market to shell more than they are likely to be comfortable with or they will likely buy below those specs.
This gives us half of the western market, now let's take the same process to the other half:
1) Average income in EU is about €18k and I'll take Italy as example up ahead as it's fairly close to the median in both income and taxes not to mention what I'm mostly familiar with
2) At this amount, the average taxation is roughly 27% which means about €13k per year, or roughly 1100€ per month (Italian posters may or may not disagree but I'm going with Eurostat sources here).
3) A ready PC of the configuration described earlier will cost you approximately 2400€ in the very best case I could find (on sale) or roughly 220% of the median paycheck! Self assembly might save a little money but the savings aren't huge (roughly 10%).
By this, I'm extremely confident more than half the potential EU market will either skip this gen or buy far lower specs than a typical "good" gaming PC would be.
I won't even try to do calculations for today's top (i9 and x90 class) specs but I'm fairly sure this gets closer to top 10% incomes.
Do you know what the net effect of this is? People entirely skipping GPUs to get a Ryzen 5700g (a regression from even Pascal levels!), buying 2nd hand last gen or getting by with either laptops, older hardware or game streaming.
I earn closer to the US median than the EU median yet as someone who has been in PC gaming for over 30 years I'd rather keep getting by with 10 years old hardware supported by a RX 590 than being mugged by either player!
