Within any given tier of gaming hardware*, the main advantage of consoles is not price, but simplicity: They’re easy to choose and easy to set up. Owning one requires practically no technical knowledge, nor effort in setup/tuning/troubleshooting.

But PC gamers get value for their efforts: The vastly larger pool of games and greater variety in hardware options are part of that value, but there is also the total cost of ownership: PC games tend to be available for lower prices during sales, and hardware upgrades can be done incrementally (ship of theseus style). Over the course of 10 years or so, that translates to either more fun or more money left to spend on other things.

Perhaps this decade’s painful rise in hardware costs is making more people willing to put in a bit of effort for a gaming PC in exchange for the better long-term value compared to a console.

*(I mention hardware tiers because it doesn’t make sense to compare a Nintendo Wii to a high-end Radeon or GeForce PC with 64GiB RAM, of course.)