At the beginning of the last console generation, $550 would get you a 980 (one of the best cards possible) while $400 would get you a new console. This generation, that same $550 will only get you a 3070 (one of the worst cards you can get performance wise and the lack of VRAM will make it obsolete next year). You can still get a brand new console for $400; all digital though.
As for online passes... they're always on sale for $30 per year which is a tiny price to pay to keep out the hackers that PC has to deal with.
And with that said... I told y'all AMD would do a paper launch just like Nvidia.