It really isn't. You can't use Steam or GOG, you have to pay to play online, the hardware is much lower end than what you can buy for a desktop, they have advertising all over the place, everything has DRM, and it's still another box.
Not to mention playing with a controller is a very different experience. A lot of younger people are probably already familiar enough with them, but I'm a fossil and need my keyboard and mouse.
>> the hardware is much lower end than what you can buy for a desktop
Tbf, you can recently get the Xbox One X for £360 with few games included(including Forza 7 and RDR2!), and it will let you play those games trouble free in rock solid 30fps in 4K - I can absolutely guarantee that you cannot build a PC to match that within that money. That's not an anti-PC argument, just wanted to point out that for people who don't want to spend a lot of money it really is an excellent option.
I would like to differ w.r.t to hardware price front, concurring with my initial point; my Windows use-case was only casual Gaming & an upgrade to Xbox One X has been impressive for my use as a casual frugal gamer.
1. Freesync support over HDMI gave good stutter free gaming experience on a low end Ultrawide PC monitor. (I didn't have to switch between my workstation setup).
2. Hardware is power-efficient & silent; I'm extremely power/noise conscious & specifically select extremely low TDP CPU's for my work. I'm not sure if I would have been able to build a PC of such low power/silent feature-set & get same gaming experience albeit; for the value.
3. Value - A new windows machine for similar gaming experience actually costs more in my country (at-least was at the time of my purchase).
4. OS - I didn't have to deal with the gripes which I have with full-fledged Windows OS; a toned down version only for gaming such as the one on Xbox is turning out to be a good fit.
5. Apps - Youtube on Xbox plays 4K without dropping frames; where as my 7th gen intel core i5 U series CPU couldn't. Youtube on Xbox is actually has less distractions than one on the web (Like comments, Ads).
> A new windows machine for similar gaming experience actually costs more in my country
I suppose it depends on your country but in the US it is significantly cheaper to build a gaming computer. The hardware in consoles is lower than most people realize.
AMD Ryzen 2400G, Linux, Firefox thus no hardware decoding, Youtube 4K@30 - 0 drops. CPU price is almost twice short of 7200U which certainly can't deliver.
Modding is also lacking on consoles (limited on some). Fantastic to see Valve etc doing this, I imagine it's the last thing keeping a fair few people on Windows (certainly for me if I can get a fair portion of Steam games on Linux that's it for the Windows partition). Old classics like Everquest I might need to look at GPU passthrough if VirtualBox supports that now).
