With sales dropping and confidence declining, how close are we to the end of consoles as we know them?
  • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    13•11 months ago

    From developers’ perspective, platforms are an obstacle. PC is the least-onerous middleman between them and customers. (And Steam still takes an entire third of their revenue.) The push for games to just work on whatever, for everyone, was already present by the PS2 era, and by the PS3 era it nearly killed the PS3. Sony’s wacky-but-powerful hardware counted for fuck-all to devs who wanted a PC release and and Xbox port or vice-versa. Sony only recovered by providing a generic API and getting some games that worked basically how they worked on every other machine.

    Everything is a computer now. The PS5 and Xbox whateveritscalled are nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo’s money-printing handheld is an Android tablet by Nvidia. There is no special sauce anymore. Microsoft is fully prepared for this, since the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market, but Sony is struggling to recognize the war is over. Helldivers showed them how much money they could make being just a PC publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. They’re not okay. Their entire business model is rooted in being a platform, when consumers are sick and tired of dealing with platforms.

    We just want to game.

  • Hal-5700X
    6•11 months ago

    I don’t get the point of consoles today. They’re locked prebuilt PCs now. At this point, just build an PC. You can do more on a PC.

    • @alessandro@lemmy.ca
      2•11 months ago

      There’s an economic network behind console: contrary to PC (which is more an abstract concept that no one owns) you can find console in your local general store: these stores put Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo brands/logo all around without the need for these three companies to directly pay them (PC/Notebook strictly places for general and office purpose). Before the ecommerce got the point is today, these stores putting free console advertising made a big difference. PC gaming industry was fragmented, also the main player in the PC sphere (Microsoft) had their own console which, due to conflict of interest, damped the huge storm of the PC gaming industry. The only company I am aware of, that consistently work in favor of PC gaming was Valve. But they were a digital store and had not much interest in the physical presence in general stores until SteamMachine/SteamController/SteamDeck