PC vs Console 2026: PC Overtakes Consoles by 2028

Ask which is better, PC or console, and you will usually get a religious answer dressed up as a technical one. The honest answer in 2026 is that the question changed underneath everybody. It is no longer really about teraflops, because the teraflops mostly stopped mattering the moment the CPU became the bottleneck. It is no longer about price certainty, because both consoles got more expensive this year for the same reason your desktop RAM did. And it is no longer about who has the bigger library, because the numbers now say the average PC gamer spends two-thirds of their time in games that are older than the console generation they could have bought instead.

So we are going to do this properly. Not a vibes war, not a spec-sheet drag race with the CPU cropped out of frame. We will follow the money, because the analysts have already called the fight. We will explain why a $599 console and a $1,300 PC both got taxed by artificial intelligence in 2026. We will read the spec sheet with the marketing removed, price out five years of ownership with the subscription tax baked in, and then tell you which one to actually buy — with the caveat that the correct answer depends entirely on whether you want to play games or keep them.

The short version, for the impatient: consoles are a subscription to the present, and a PC is a deed to the past. Everything below is the receipts.

Follow the Money: PC Wins by 2028

When two things are hard to compare on their merits, watch where the capital flows. In gaming, the capital has made up its mind, and it is not subtle about it.

PC passes console revenue in 2028 — Newzoo says so, not the fanboys

The market-intelligence firm Newzoo's 2026 PC and Console Gaming Report projects the PC segment to grow by an average of 6.6% annually through 2028, while the console segment grows at 4.4%. That gap compounds. The combined PC-and-console market Newzoo tracks runs from roughly $88.3 billion in 2025 to $94.3 billion in 2026 and on to about $103.7 billion by 2028 — and at that point, for the first time in thirteen years, slightly more than half of it comes from PC games. The PC gaming audience is forecast to hit 966 million people by the end of 2026 and cross one billion by 2028.

Note what that does to the tired talking point that "console outgrows PC." It does not. Any research brief telling you consoles are expanding at 7% while PC crawls along at 2.6% has the arrows pointed backwards. Newzoo — the firm the entire industry actually cites — has PC growing at half again the rate of console and overtaking it outright in raw revenue inside three years. The driver is not a Western console recession; it is the long tail, free-to-play in Asia, and Chinese PC gamers who grew another 11.7% in 2025 alone.

The RPPU inversion: console players spend more, PC players are more numerous

Here is the wrinkle that makes both camps half-right at once. Per MIDiA Research, the average revenue per paying user in 2024 was $81.68 on console versus $55.47 on PC. Console players spend more per head. They buy the $70 game at launch, they buy the season pass, they are a more concentrated, higher-intent, higher-margin audience. If you are Sony or Microsoft, that number is your entire business model on one line.

And yet PC wins the total. It wins on headcount — nearly a billion players against a console installed base a fraction of that size — and it wins on the long tail, where microtransactions now account for roughly 48% of PC revenue while game sales still make up about half of console revenue. Console is the premium boutique with high spend per customer. PC is the sprawling bazaar with more customers than anyone can count. In 2028 the bazaar's total receipts finally pass the boutique's. Both facts are true; only one of them is destiny.

Statista's $53.2 billion and the growth trap

For scale, Statista pegs global console revenue at about $53.2 billion in 2025. That is an enormous, healthy, non-dying market — nobody sane is writing consoles' obituary. But size is not the same as momentum, and a research packet that quotes the console market's size and then implies it is also growing faster is quietly swapping one number for another. The developers already voted with their roadmaps: the GDC State of the Game Industry survey of more than 3,000 developers found 80% making games for PC — up from 66% — against 37% for PlayStation and 33% for Xbox. When four out of five developers target your platform first, you do not have a growth problem. You have gravity.

The AI RAM Tax on Both Boxes

If you remember one thing from 2026, make it this: the same shortage that spiked the price of your next graphics card also forced both console makers to raise prices for the first time mid-generation, in the same calendar year, citing the same cause. Nobody escaped. The AI boom ate the memory supply, and gamers on every platform are picking up the tab.

Sony blinked first: PS5 at $649, PS5 Pro at $899

On April 2, 2026, Sony raised console prices globally. The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition went to $599.99, the disc model to $649.99, and the PS5 Pro to $899.99 — each standard PS5 up $100, the Pro up $150. Sony's own language was blunt: "With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we've made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally." Behind the corporate register sat a specific stack of causes: an AI-driven memory-chip shortage, a 25% US semiconductor tariff, and a weak yen squeezing a company that builds its hardware in Asia and sells it in dollars.

Anyone still quoting the PS5 at $499 is reading a two-year-old price tag. That number is dead. It died in April. The cheapest way into current-gen PlayStation in mid-2026 is $599.99, and if you want the disc drive so you can actually resell or lend the games you "buy," it is $649.99.

Microsoft followed: Series X at $799 on August 1

Microsoft held out a few months longer and then did the exact same thing. Per Xbox Wire on June 25, 2026, effective August 1, the Xbox Series X 1TB disc model rises to $799.99 and the 1TB all-digital model to $749.99 — both up $150 — while the Series S 512GB climbs to $499.99, up $100. The 2TB Series X is being sunset entirely. As of March 2026 that base 1TB Series X was still $649.99, so this is a fresh, steep move.

Microsoft's stated reason, reported by CNBC, is worth quoting because it says the quiet part out loud: "Console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and Microsoft expects another doubling by the fall of 2027." And then the razor-and-blades confession that console economics runs on: "Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make." That is the whole model, admitted in a press release. The console is sold at or below cost and the money is supposed to come back through software, subscriptions, and store cuts. When the loss on the box gets too deep, the box costs more. It is not greed; it is arithmetic finally catching up.

The DDR5 mirror: your PC build got taxed by the same shortage

Now the part the console camp forgets and the PC camp does not want to admit: the exact same shortage gutted the value proposition of a DIY build. A 32GB DDR5 kit that ran roughly $100–$200 in October 2025 now sits north of $350, with some DDR5-6000 kits touching $432 — call it a 400% swing in months. Tom's Hardware put the floor at "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 minimum." XDA summarized it as prices having "tripled in six months." Gartner projects a 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD pricing by the end of 2026, a 17% jump in the average PC's price, and a 10.4% drop in PC shipments as buyers balk. HP now says memory alone is about 35% of a PC's bill of materials, up from 15–18%. TrendForce estimates AI is consuming around 20% of all DRAM wafers in 2026, and SK hynix has signaled the constraint runs through 2030.

Read the two stories side by side and they are the same story. Datacenters full of AI accelerators bought the memory supply out from under consumer hardware, and every gaming platform — Sony's, Microsoft's, and the one you were going to build yourself — got more expensive at once. The 2026 PC-versus-console decision is not being made in a world of falling prices and Moore's Law dividends. It is being made in a world where silicon is a contested resource and gamers are not the highest bidder. Plan accordingly.

Raw Power: TFLOPS vs Reality

Fine. You still want to know which one is faster. The answer is "the PC, at the top, by a margin consoles cannot close" — and "basically nobody's actual PC, in the middle, where it's a wash." Both halves of that sentence matter.

16.7 vs 12.15 vs whatever is in your tower

The PS5 Pro's 45%-faster GPU is the current console high-water mark: a 60 compute-unit RDNA-based part rated at roughly 16.7 TFLOPS, paired with eight Zen 2 CPU cores, about 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth, 2TB of storage, Wi-Fi 7, and Sony's PSSR machine-learning upscaler. The base PS5 sits at 36 CUs and 10.28 TFLOPS. The Xbox Series X holds at 12.15 TFLOPS, which in practical GPU terms lands around an NVIDIA RTX 3070. The PS5 Pro's raw graphics ceiling is in the neighborhood of an RTX 4060 Ti to RTX 4070 depending on the title. A gaming PC with an RTX 4080 or anything in the RTX 5000-series simply plays in a tier consoles do not reach — more headroom, higher resolutions held at higher frame rates, ray tracing that does not require an upscaler doing 70% of the work.

FLOPflation: why Cerny says the number lies

Before anyone cross-multiplies teraflops into a verdict, the man who architected the machine would like a word. In Tom's Hardware's breakdown of the PS5 Pro, system architect Mark Cerny pushes back on what he calls "FLOPflation" — the habit of treating a teraflops figure as a cross-architecture unit of truth. It is not one. A teraflop on RDNA is not a teraflop on Ada Lovelace is not a teraflop on Blackwell; the caches, the clocks, the feature sets, and the upscalers all move the real-world result. TFLOPS is a bench number, not a promise. Anyone selling you a clean "PC is X% faster" figure derived purely from teraflops is selling you a spreadsheet, not a game.

The 60fps mirage and GTA VI's 30fps confession

Here is where the console power story quietly falls apart: the GPU got the mid-gen upgrade, and the CPU mostly did not. The most expensive proof is the biggest game of the decade. Per Digital Foundry, reported by TechRadar, Grand Theft Auto VI is likely to run at a 30fps baseline even on PS5 Pro when it lands November 19, 2026, with a 40fps mode floated as the compromise if 60 is "a bridge too far." The reason is explicitly the CPU: the PS5 Pro, in Digital Foundry's words, "only offers a fractional CPU performance bump over base PS5, with most of its advantage deriving from better GPU horsepower, improved RT acceleration and support for PSSR upscaling." You bought a faster painter and the same slow bricklayer.

Consoles typically target 30 or 60fps, with a "performance mode" reaching 120fps on select, simpler titles. A PC uncaps entirely — your frame ceiling is whatever your GPU and monitor negotiate, and competitive players run 240Hz and beyond. But temper the fantasy with the census. The Steam Hardware Survey in June 2026 shows the single most common GPU is the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 3.81% — the first time a mobile chip has ever led the chart — followed by the desktop RTX 3060 at 3.73% and the RTX 5060 at 2.66%. The mythical RTX 4080 master-race rig is not the median PC. The median PC is a laptop 4060 and a desktop 3060, which is to say a PS5-class machine with extra steps and a Steam library. PC's power advantage is real, but it lives at the top of the stack, not the middle, and "soaring memory and storage costs" are actively pushing the middle toward laptops and handhelds.

The Spec Sheet Showdown

Time to lay the three contenders on the table and read the specs without the sizzle reel. The "Mid-range Gaming PC" column assumes a realistic 2026 build around an RTX 4060/4070-class GPU — the machine most cross-shoppers are actually pricing against a console, RAM tax and all.

Reading the table without the marketing

Where the PC column wins, and where it is a trap

The PC column wins every row that has the word "open," "upgrade," or "$0" in it. It plays your games at higher frame rates if you spend for the hardware, it never charges you to connect to another human, it runs mods and emulators and thirty years of back catalog, and you can replace one part at a time instead of buying a whole new box. Seagate's own console-versus-PC explainer concedes the point plainly: "PCs allow for incremental upgrades... whereas consoles remain static until the next generation," and "PCs give you the power to fine-tune every element if you're willing to pay for it."

That last clause is the trap. "If you're willing to pay for it" is doing heavy lifting in 2026. The entry MSRP row is the one that stings: a genuinely PS5-Pro-beating build is a four-figure outlay before the DDR5 surcharge, and even a PS5-equivalent build now costs more up front than the console it merely matches. The PC's ceiling is unreachable by consoles; the PC's floor is no longer meaningfully cheaper than one.

The handheld asterisk: Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Switch 2

The tidy three-column war is also getting blurred at the edges by machines that are consoles in shape and PCs in soul. Valve's Steam Deck and the ROG Ally X are x86 PCs you hold like a Game Boy — full Steam libraries, desktop modes, and emulation on the couch. Nintendo's Switch 2 undercuts the Steam Deck on price while leaning on DLSS to punch above its wattage. Notably, the Steam Hardware Survey's tilt toward mobile silicon — that laptop RTX 4060 sitting at number one — is partly these handhelds registering as PCs. The category that is actually growing fastest is the one that refuses to pick a side.

Total Cost: The 5-Year Math

Sticker price is a down payment on a relationship. Consoles win the first date and then bill you monthly. PCs cost more to move in and then mostly leave you alone. Let us price the whole five years, honestly, with the 2026 tax included.

Upfront: the console still wins the door price

Even after two price hikes, the console still wins the moment of purchase. The cheapest current-gen door prices in mid-2026 look like this:

Subscriptions, storefronts, and the online tax

This is where the console's cheaper door price starts leaking. To play online on PlayStation you pay for PlayStation Plus, whose annual tiers held steady in 2026 at Essential $79.99, Extra $134.99, and Premium $159.99 (Sony raised the monthly and quarterly plans in May but left the yearly ones alone). Xbox restructured around Game Pass, whose Ultimate tier was actually cut to $22.99/month in April 2026 after backlash from a $29.99 peak, with an Essential entry tier at $9.99/month; the old Game Pass Core online pass historically ran about $59.99/year. On PC, the number is a rounder figure: zero. Steam, Epic, and Battle.net do not charge you to connect to another player. Over five years that difference is not a rounding error.

The five-year ledger (with the RAM tax baked in)

Put it in a ledger. Assume a modest player who buys a console with the basic online sub versus a PC with no sub and a mix of full-price and Steam-sale games. Round numbers, honestly labeled:

FIVE-YEAR TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP (illustrative)
------------------------------------------------------------
                        CONSOLE PATH        PC PATH
  Hardware (entry)      $599.99 (PS5 Dig)   $1,200 (mid build)
  Online sub x5 yrs     $399.95 (PS+ Ess)   $0
  ~30 games @ delta*    ~$1,800 ($60 avg)   ~$1,350 ($45 avg)
  Storage upgrade       ~$90 (1TB M.2)      ~$70 (add a drive)
------------------------------------------------------------
  5-YEAR TOTAL          ~$2,890             ~$2,620
------------------------------------------------------------
* PC games trend cheaper via Steam sales, bundles, key resellers
  and the absence of a hard $70 launch floor. Consoles lock
  you nearer full MSRP for longer.

The console starts $600 ahead and the PC claws it back through free online play and cheaper software, landing roughly even-to-slightly-ahead across five years — not the mythical "$1,000 saved" that some briefs like to quote, and nowhere near the fantasy "$276/year PlayStation Plus" that a careless source will invent to make the math look worse than it is (Plus Essential is $79.99/year; the scary total only works if you make the subscription cost three times reality). The truth is duller and more useful: the PC's five-year cost is competitive, the console's up-front cost is lower, and the AI RAM tax narrowed the PC's long-run advantage in 2026 by making the build itself pricier. If you keep hardware for a decade and buy a lot of games, PC pulls clearly ahead. If you buy the box, play four exclusives, and mostly game online with friends, the console's math is perfectly rational.

Library, Legacy & the 67%

Now the part this site cares about more than frame rates: what happens to the games after the hype cycle moves on. This is the axis where the two platforms are not close, and it is the one the marketing never mentions, because the answer embarrasses the console.

67% of PC playtime is 6+ years old

Per Newzoo, in 2024 roughly 67% of PC playtime went to games that are six or more years old, and only about 8% went to brand-new releases. Let that sink in. The average PC gamer is not living on the launch calendar; they are living in a back catalog — the Valve and Blizzard evergreens, the strategy games patched for a decade, the modded RPGs, the indie darlings, the entire GOG shelf of things that would otherwise be dead. Newzoo also notes PC is now the first major platform where the majority of revenue in Western markets comes from games outside the top 20. Console, by contrast, skews hard to the new and the recurring: Newzoo found sports and shooters dominating, with sports overtaking action-adventure as the top genre on Xbox in 2024. Console is a machine tuned for the game everyone is playing this month. PC is a machine tuned for every game anyone has ever played.

Emulation, DMCA §1201, and the games consoles won't let you keep

Here is the lore-and-law aside, because The Machine reads the EULA so you do not have to. When you "buy" a digital game on PlayStation or Xbox, you are not buying the game. You are buying a revocable license to access it, tethered to an account and a storefront that can — and repeatedly has threatened to — close. Console generations have made a habit of nearly orphaning entire digital libraries when a store sunsets. On PC the same license logic technically applies on Steam, but two escape hatches exist that consoles deny you: the DRM-free storefront (GOG will hand you an installer you can back up to a shoebox drive and run after the servers are cinders), and emulation.

Emulation is legal to run; the game you dump is the legal gray zone, governed in the US by the DMCA's Section 1201 anti-circumvention rules, with the Library of Congress periodically granting narrow preservation exemptions that keep the practice from being flatly illegal. Consoles are engineered specifically to stop you from exercising any of it — locked bootloaders, signed firmware, the whole cathedral of DRM. A PC is a general-purpose computer, and a general-purpose computer is a preservation machine. If you want your library to outlive the platform holder's balance sheet, you want the open box. Our Batocera setup walkthrough exists precisely because a PC can become the retro console that every console refuses to be.

Backward compatibility: who actually lets you play your old stuff

Give the console camp its due on one narrow front. Among the closed boxes, Xbox runs the best backward-compatibility program in the business — four generations deep, original Xbox and 360 titles enhanced and running on Series X, a genuine and underrated act of stewardship. PlayStation's compatibility is shallower, effectively the PS4 library forward, with older generations parceled out through the PS Plus Premium streaming-and-classics tier rather than run natively. But "best among consoles" still loses to "open" by a mile. Neither console lets you install whatever you want, dump your own cartridges, or run a shader stack from 2003. The PC does all of it before breakfast. For a reader of this site, this section alone decides the argument.

Five Buyers, Five Right Answers

"Which is better" is the wrong question because there is no universal buyer. There are archetypes, and each one has a correct answer that the other archetypes would find insane. Here are the ones that cover almost everyone.

The couch family and the plug-and-play case

Buyer 1: The family. The ESA reports that a large majority of parents play video games and that most of those play with their children — family gaming is a real and durable driver of console adoption, precisely because a console asks nothing of you. No driver updates, no launcher wars, no "did you set the shader cache," just a controller and a couch. Seagate's explainer lands it: "For plug-and-play simplicity and consistent optimization, consoles still hold strong appeal." For a household that wants four controllers and zero troubleshooting, buy the PS5 or a Series S and never think about it again. Answer: console.

Buyer 2: The Day-One buyer on a budget. If your entire relationship with gaming is "I want to play the new blockbuster the week it launches, at the lowest possible entry price, with a guarantee it runs," the console is engineered for you. The developer optimized for one fixed spec; it will run. At $599.99 for a PS5 Digital or $499.99 for a Series S, nothing in PC land gets you a comparable turnkey launch experience for the money. Answer: console.

The competitive shooter and the 240Hz case

Buyer 3: The competitive player. If your genre is tactical shooters, MOBAs, fighting games, or anything where a 240Hz panel and a mouse are not luxuries but instruments, the console is a handicap. Consoles cap most experiences at 60fps and reach 120 only on chosen titles; a PC feeds a high-refresh monitor whatever it can render, uncapped, with input latency the console cannot match. The free online play removes the recurring tax on top. And when your ranked ladder depends on a stable connection, the network layer matters as much as the GPU — worth pairing with a serious gaming router to keep latency honest. Answer: PC.

The preservationist, the modder, and the tinkerer

Buyer 4: The preservationist / retro gamer. You are, statistically, most PC gamers — remember, 67% of PC playtime is games six years old or older. If you care about the back catalog, DRM-free ownership, and emulation, this is not a contest. The PC is the only platform that treats your library as yours. Answer: PC.

Buyer 5: The modder / creator / streamer. Mods are a first-class citizen on PC and a curated afterthought on console. If you want script extenders, texture packs, total conversions, or a capture-and-broadcast pipeline that does not fight you, the open box wins — though it is worth noting a console plus a capture card and a streaming rig is a perfectly valid split-the-difference setup for a couch creator. Answer: PC (with a console-plus-capture honorable mention).

Buyer 6: The portable. If the whole point is playing on a train, the handhelds have quietly become their own answer — a Steam Deck or ROG Ally to bring your PC library along, or a Switch 2 for the first-party Nintendo lock-ins. Answer: it's a third thing now.

Pros and Cons, Tallied

Every platform is a bundle of trade-offs pretending to be a personality. Here they are with the pretense removed.

PC: the open platform, taxed and rewarded

PlayStation 5 / Pro: the polished cage

Xbox Series X|S: Game Pass and the identity question

Switching Sides: Migration Guide

Say the price hikes or the GTA VI frame-rate news pushed you off the fence. Here is how to change platforms without torching your saves, your friends list, or your dignity.

Console → PC: what transfers and what doesn't

The blunt truth first: the games you "bought" on PlayStation or Xbox do not come with you. There is no license bridge from PSN or the Microsoft Store to Steam; you re-buy, softened by the fact that PC prices trend lower and the sales are relentless. What does come with you is your progress in cross-progression titles — Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny, and most modern live-service games sync to a publisher account (Epic, Activision, Bungie) independent of the platform, so your ranks, skins, and unlocks follow the login, not the box. Your controller comes too: a DualSense pairs to a PC over USB or Bluetooth and works through Steam Input, and an Xbox controller is natively supported by Windows because it is, in effect, already a PC peripheral.

1. Create or consolidate your publisher accounts (Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net) before you sell the console, and link them to your platform profile so nothing is stranded.
2. Verify cross-progression is enabled in each live-service game while you still have the console booted.
3. Note which purchases are exclusive to the console ecosystem — those are the ones you're truly leaving behind or must re-buy.
4. For old console libraries with no PC equivalent, plan an emulation setup as your preservation layer.
5. Keep the console until every save and account is confirmed live on PC. Then, and only then, list it.

PC → Console: downsizing to the couch

Going the other way is easier logistically and harder emotionally. The console will not run your mods, your emulators, or your DRM-free GOG shelf, so make peace with leaving your open-platform habits at the door. But cloud saves in cross-progression games still carry your progress down to the couch, your Xbox controller works on both, and the simplicity you are buying is the entire point. If you are downsizing because the RAM tax made your next build unaffordable, the Series S at $499.99 is the rational landing spot.

Keeping your saves, your friends, and your sanity

Whichever direction you go, cloud saves are your safety net: PlayStation Plus cloud storage, Xbox cloud saves, and Steam Cloud all exist so a dead drive is an inconvenience, not a tragedy — turn them on before you migrate, not after. Cross-play has matured to the point where switching platforms rarely means abandoning your friends; the same lobby now holds PC, PlayStation, and Xbox players in most major multiplayer titles. The one thing no migration fixes is exclusives. If the game you love is welded to a platform, the platform owns you, and no guide can unweld it.

The Verdict

We promised a data-backed recommendation, not a shrug. Here it is, and it is a split decision with a clear logic behind the split.

If you buy one thing in 2026

For the largest group of people — the ones who want to play the new game on the couch, at the lowest door price, with zero maintenance — the pragmatic 2026 buy is the PS5 Digital Edition at $599.99, or the Xbox Series S at $499.99 if the budget is the hard constraint and you can live with a digital-only, lighter-weight box. Note what did not make that sentence: the PS5 Pro. At $899.99, sold as a premium upgrade that is mostly GPU on an unchanged CPU, it is the hardest buy to justify in the lineup — and the biggest game of the year proving the point by launching at 30fps on it is not a coincidence, it is a diagnosis.

The data-backed recommendation

For anyone who cares about keeping games rather than merely playing them — the modder, the preservationist, the competitive player, the person who reads a retro-gaming site — the answer is the PC, and the data is not shy about why. Newzoo has PC revenue overtaking console by 2028 on 6.6% growth against 4.4%. GDC has 80% of developers building for it first. MIDiA shows console players spend more per head, but PC wins on nearly a billion players and a long tail that now outweighs the blockbusters. And the 67% figure — two-thirds of PC playtime spent in games older than the current console generation — is the whole retro case in a single statistic. A PC is the only platform that treats your library as an asset instead of a rental.

The honest caveat: the RAM tax changed the math

The caveat that keeps this from being a coronation: 2026 was a bad year to need silicon. The AI memory shortage pushed DDR5 up as much as 400%, pushed the PS5 and Xbox to their first mid-generation price hikes, and pushed the median Steam machine toward laptops and handhelds rather than towers. The PC still wins the five-year math for a heavy user, but it wins by less than it did a year ago, and its up-front cost is now genuinely painful. If you build in 2026, build knowing memory is the expensive part and the shortage may run toward 2030.

So the verdict stands as the thesis: buy the console to play, build the PC to keep. A console is a beautifully optimized subscription to the present moment in gaming — pay the door price, pay the online tax, enjoy the exclusives, and accept that the library is on loan. A PC is a deed to everything gaming has ever been and a claim on where the revenue is heading. Pick the one that matches what you actually want from the hobby, pay the 2026 tax that neither of them let you dodge, and ignore anyone who tells you the other tribe is stupid. They just answered a different question than you did.