Ten Reasons Why A Games Console Is One Of The Best Investments You Can Make
Ten Reasons Why A Games Console Is One Of The Best Investments You Can Make
On average, the new generation of consoles comes out every six years.
Microsoft Xbox
Year
Console
2001
Microsoft Xbox
2005
Microsoft Xbox 360
2013
Microsoft Xbox One
Sony Playstation
Year
Console
1995
Playstation
2000
Playstation 2
2006
Playstation 3
2013
Playstation 4
Consoles Last For Years
Even allowing for the abuse a console can sometimes suffer at the hands of over-excited teenagers, you can expect to get a decade’s worth of gaming out of your average Playstation or Xbox. Even if you bought the new version on the day of release, you’d get about six years out of it. Average price £350 / 10 years = £35 per year. Or £58 a year if you bought a new unit every six years.
So Many Great Games
Over the years you own the console, several awesome games will have been released to the market. These form gaming milestones. All the Grand Theft Auto games, the Call of Duty series, The Last of Us, the Battlefield series, Minecraft, Metal Gear Solid, various Rock Band versions. All sorts of games in all sorts of genres. Think about how many great games there will have been over a ten year period.
Countless Hours Of Entertainment
Depending on the type of game, there are hours of game-play time in the story mode of a release. That’s not including all the hours you can spend driving around the Sonora Desert in GTAV, or trying to breed a golden Chocobo bird in Final Fantasy VII. Compare that to the time you spent watching the last DVD you bought. The odds are you’ll never watch that disc again. Or that novel you read – you might read it again, but you won’t read it over and over again and enjoy slightly different nuances each time you do. And this doesn’t include online multiplayer gaming.
The Social Aspect – Online Multiplayer Mode
The image of a teenage boy locked away in a darkened room interacting with no-one is no longer very accurate. Pretty much every single game release has an online mode for players to play against other gamers. Just like Facebook and Twitter, gamers add their mates to their friends lists on their consoles and regularly hook up with them, either through gaming or via the mic-headsets. People are way more connected to each other than they ever were before, and games consoles are no different.
The Social Aspect – Pass The Controller On The Left-Hand Side
On its release, the Xbox 360 was touted as a media centre as well as a games console, with the idea that it could store and stream music, film and TV, from services such as Spotify and Netflix. It’s remained the same way with modern consoles in the development of the PS4 and the Xbox One. So as well as playing games with friends and family, consoles can be the focal point for social interaction. If you watched a film with friends, it would last about two hours. But you could spend an entire night playing Rock Band with your mates or bemused older relatives.
Not Just Games
From the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 onwards, consoles have become media centres and entertainment hubs. With access to the internet, gamers can now watch TV through Netflix and Amazon Prime etc, use apps, and generally browse the web. Theoretically a console replaces the need for a conventional laptop or cable TV package.
Return On Investment Only Increases With Use
The more you use your console, the more value you get out of it. Imagine you buy two pairs of shoes, one for £10 and another for £100. You never wear the £10 pair, but you wear the £100 ones all the time. The £100 pair of shoes was the better investment. You wasted £10. If you’re playing games, the average minimum time spent playing in a single sitting is likely to be one hour. A couple of sessions on the console a week adds up, making it potentially one of the most heavily-used pieces of technology over its lifetime.
Console, Games, & Accessories Can Be Re-Sold
Over the course of a console’s tenure in that prime spot beneath your television, you’re likely to have bought several games. Once completed or grown tired of, these can be sold or exchanged for newer products. I’ve done this with just about every game for every platform I’ve owned. Games and accessories, as well as the console unit itself, have relatively high resale values. I remember selling my PS2 and everything that it came with, including games and the original box, for close to £100 when I upgraded to an Xbox 360 about ten years ago. Not only did I off-load unwanted possessions, the money raised made a dent in the cost of buying the new unit. The longer you hold on to old technology, the more the value drops.
It’s Also A DVD/Blu-Ray Player
The days of having a stack of black and grey plastic boxes beneath your TV to meet your entertainment needs is long gone, thankfully. A DVD player, a cable or satellite box, a games console and perhaps a VHS player would have sat there, mournfully reminding you of all the money you’ve spent over the years in an attempt to keep up with technological advances. For those times when you do need to play media from a physical source, the games console has that covered too. Take that DVD player to your local recycling centre.
If You’re Playing Games, You’re Not In The Pub
OK, there are times when you’d rather be in the pub. Quite often in fact. But a Saturday night spent in front of the games console playing through the delicate narrative of something like The Last of Us, or watching the hilarious exploits of characters such as Trevor Phillips in Grand Theft Auto V is way cheaper than a round of drinks, not to mention much easier on your liver. A night out can cost anything from upwards of £20, and often leads to a bad hangover the following day. There are no such issues with a night of gaming. Unless of course you get through a crate of beers while playing, but hey, knock yourself out…
Think of all the entertainment value this stack of old games consoles contains.
If you were to buy a new games console every time the next generation of gaming systems was released, you can expect an average of about six years between purchases. At between £300-400/$400-$600 per unit, consoles don’t fall into the impulse buy category very easily, but with several years between releases, the investment is still a good one. It won’t make you money (unless you’re one of these guys), but money isn’t the only thing of value to consider when looking at investments, is it?
On average, the new generation of consoles comes out every six years.
Microsoft Xbox
Year
Console
2001
Microsoft Xbox
2005
Microsoft Xbox 360
2013
Microsoft Xbox One
Sony Playstation
Year
Console
1995
Playstation
2000
Playstation 2
2006
Playstation 3
2013
Playstation 4
As long as you don’t suffer anything as catastrophic as the RROD, your console will serve you faithfully for years. I’ve owned a Playstation 2 and a Microsoft Xbox 360 over the last fifteen years and both have been as reliable as a Japanese-built Toyota. I’ve just bought a PS4, and I don’t expect to buy another console for the best part of ten years.
Put simply, a games console is one of the best investments you can make . Here are ten reasons why;
Consoles Last For Years
Even allowing for the abuse a console can sometimes suffer at the hands of over-excited teenagers, you can expect to get a decade’s worth of gaming out of your average Playstation or Xbox. Even if you bought the new version on the day of release, you’d get about six years out of it. Average price £350 / 10 years = £35 per year. Or £58 a year if you bought a new unit every six years.
So Many Great Games
Over the years you own the console, several awesome games will have been released to the market. These form gaming milestones. All the Grand Theft Auto games, the Call of Duty series, The Last of Us, the Battlefield series, Minecraft, Metal Gear Solid, various Rock Band versions. All sorts of games in all sorts of genres. Think about how many great games there will have been over a ten year period.
Just enjoy the scenery in Grand Theft Auto V…
Countless Hours Of Entertainment
Depending on the type of game, there are hours of game-play time in the story mode of a release. That’s not including all the hours you can spend driving around the Sonora Desert in GTAV, or trying to breed a golden Chocobo bird in Final Fantasy VII. Compare that to the time you spent watching the last DVD you bought. The odds are you’ll never watch that disc again. Or that novel you read – you might read it again, but you won’t read it over and over again and enjoy slightly different nuances each time you do. And this doesn’t include online multiplayer gaming.
The Social Aspect – Online Multiplayer Mode
The image of a teenage boy locked away in a darkened room interacting with no-one is no longer very accurate. Pretty much every single game release has an online mode for players to play against other gamers. Just like Facebook and Twitter, gamers add their mates to their friends lists on their consoles and regularly hook up with them, either through gaming or via the mic-headsets. People are way more connected to each other than they ever were before, and games consoles are no different.
The Social Aspect – Pass The Controller On The Left-Hand Side
On its release, the Xbox 360 was touted as a media centre as well as a games console, with the idea that it could store and stream music, film and TV, from services such as Spotify and Netflix. It’s remained the same way with modern consoles in the development of the PS4 and the Xbox One. So as well as playing games with friends and family, consoles can be the focal point for social interaction. If you watched a film with friends, it would last about two hours. But you could spend an entire night playing Rock Band with your mates or bemused older relatives.
Not Just Games
From the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 onwards, consoles have become media centres and entertainment hubs. With access to the internet, gamers can now watch TV through Netflix and Amazon Prime etc, use apps, and generally browse the web. Theoretically a console replaces the need for a conventional laptop or cable TV package.
Return On Investment Only Increases With Use
The more you use your console, the more value you get out of it. Imagine you buy two pairs of shoes, one for £10 and another for £100. You never wear the £10 pair, but you wear the £100 ones all the time. The £100 pair of shoes was the better investment. You wasted £10. If you’re playing games, the average minimum time spent playing in a single sitting is likely to be one hour. A couple of sessions on the console a week adds up, making it potentially one of the most heavily-used pieces of technology over its lifetime.
Console, Games, & Accessories Can Be Re-Sold
Over the course of a console’s tenure in that prime spot beneath your television, you’re likely to have bought several games. Once completed or grown tired of, these can be sold or exchanged for newer products. I’ve done this with just about every game for every platform I’ve owned. Games and accessories, as well as the console unit itself, have relatively high resale values. I remember selling my PS2 and everything that it came with, including games and the original box, for close to £100 when I upgraded to an Xbox 360 about ten years ago. Not only did I off-load unwanted possessions, the money raised made a dent in the cost of buying the new unit. The longer you hold on to old technology, the more the value drops.
It’s Also A DVD/Blu-Ray Player
The days of having a stack of black and grey plastic boxes beneath your TV to meet your entertainment needs is long gone, thankfully. A DVD player, a cable or satellite box, a games console and perhaps a VHS player would have sat there, mournfully reminding you of all the money you’ve spent over the years in an attempt to keep up with technological advances. For those times when you do need to play media from a physical source, the games console has that covered too. Take that DVD player to your local recycling centre.
If You’re Playing Games, You’re Not In The Pub
OK, there are times when you’d rather be in the pub. Quite often in fact. But a Saturday night spent in front of the games console playing through the delicate narrative of something like The Last of Us, or watching the hilarious exploits of characters such as Trevor Phillips in Grand Theft Auto V is way cheaper than a round of drinks, not to mention much easier on your liver. A night out can cost anything from upwards of £20, and often leads to a bad hangover the following day. There are no such issues with a night of gaming. Unless of course you get through a crate of beers while playing, but hey, knock yourself out…
I didn’t mention the Nintendo Wii, did I? That’s because it’s not a real console with real games. If you bought a Wii, then you’ve probably already wasted your money. Sorry.
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