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On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board, a thread titled “It’s wrong that consoles are better value just because of ‘paid online’ or overall cost-effectiveness” blew up after someone replied with “Let me introduce you to: ‘electricity bills.’” The original post calculated the Nintendo Switch 2’s power draw at about 20W versus a gaming PC’s 300W, putting the difference at roughly ¥8.68 per hour — which adds up to over ¥6,000 a year if used 2 hours a day. The thread saw a flood of pushback over whether the math ignored online subscription fees and whether assuming a 300W power supply was even reasonable, and the debate never really settled.
What people said
Guys still living in their childhood bedroom have no concept of electricity bills
Seriously, this is exactly the problem
(*Calculated at a rate of ¥31/kWh)
■ Cost per hour
・Switch 2 (approx. 20W): approx. ¥0.62
・Gaming PC (300W): approx. ¥9.30
(Difference: approx. ¥8.68/hour — the PC costs about 15x more)
■ Annual cost and difference by usage pattern
① 2 hours daily (approx. 730 hours/year)
・Switch 2: approx. ¥453
・Gaming PC: approx. ¥6,789
・Difference: approx. ¥6,336/year
② 4 hours daily (approx. 1,460 hours/year)
・Switch 2: approx. ¥905
・Gaming PC: approx. ¥13,578
・Difference: approx. ¥12,673/year
③ 5 hours, weekends only (approx. 260 hours/year)
・Switch 2: approx. ¥161
・Gaming PC: approx. ¥2,418
・Difference: approx. ¥2,257/year
How much electricity does a PS5 actually use?
I don't even use Game Pass but I'm still paying for a subscription
If the target power draw is 300W, isn't it normal to put in a 600W+ power supply?
That's outdated knowledge from back when PSUs were garbage
Back then a '600W' unit often only had around 400W of real capacity, so that was true
These days if it says 600W, you actually get 600W, so you don't need that much extra headroom
Classic mistake from someone whose knowledge is stuck in the past
>These days if it says 600W, you actually get 600W, so you don't need that much extra headroom
LOL that's absolute nonsense
What's nonsense about it? I just said the rated spec is actually accurate 😁
Are you seriously claiming there's no way a PSU could actually hit its rated spec!? 😡🤔
why isn't the online subscription fee factored in?
Include that and the gap gets smaller
and for PlayStation it'd probably flip the other way, right? lol
Because it's not mandatory
If Steam ever started charging for online, its market cap would skyrocket
It'd end up as big as Netflix
Wouldn't people just flock to Epic or the MS Store instead?
…well, maybe not the MS Store
I've never even seen a gaming PC with a 300W power supply
That's beside the point
The point is, if you're at an income level where you have to worry about a game's electricity cost, you shouldn't be buying games in the first place
At the very least, that kind of talk only flies in Japan where electricity is cheap
Overseas, electricity costs an order of magnitude more and keeps climbing, so a gaming PC's power bill actually hits households hard
Even accounting for degradation, you don't need double capacity these days
Nowadays 1.2 to 1.5x is plenty of margin
That's about right when docked
In handheld mode it's more like 10W
2 hours of play costs 1 yen in electricity
That's insane, right?
Show us your watt meter then
The PS5 should cost more in electricity than the Switch 2
you're not running it at max power draw 24/7
There are occasionally people who see a PC's PSU wattage rating and assume it's constantly drawing that much power
That's impressive
Honestly, for Japanese games that max out at FHD 60fps anyway, the Switch 2 might be fine instead of a PC
There's no such game, and choosing the downgraded version on low-spec hardware like the Switch 2 would be stupid
Nah, if you exclude AAA titles, Japanese games tend to run at low internal resolutions anyway
No, even Japanese games mostly hit 4K on the PC version
Why would that defeat the point?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Playing online with a home console typically requires an annual subscription fee, such as Nintendo Switch Online or PlayStation Plus, whereas on PC, platforms like Steam often don’t charge extra for online play itself. The “cost-effectiveness” argument that kicked off this thread was pointing at that gap, but the electricity cost calculation in the original post fixed the PC’s power draw at a flat 300W, without noting that actual consumption varies widely depending on the game and the PC’s components. Electricity rates themselves also vary by contract, region, and time of day, so the ¥31/kWh figure used here is just one rough benchmark. Commenters in the thread raised points about factoring in online subscription costs and pushed back on how the power supply capacity was being calculated, suggesting this isn’t really a topic that can be settled with a simple numbers comparison.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Idiot: ‘It’s wrong that consoles are cost-effective just because of paid online!’ Me: ‘Electricity bills’.”
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