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The console wars have been lost

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Re: The console wars have been lost

#41

Post by jhack »

alex43578 wrote: post #17
jhack wrote: post #14

“If I can't give people physical games as gifts anymore, why should I bother buying the new console?” “Man, Valve really does win by doing absolutely nothing while the rest of the industry shoots itself in the head.” Good luck buying physical games on PC?

The argument is that physical media was the one benefit consoles had. If you’re just buying a locked down, non-upgradable, low performance PC disguised as a console (without access to the superior Steam storefront), why not just get a PC?

Lower up-front cost and hardware longevity are the two major ones. Whenever GTA VI launches on PC, good luck running it on your $500 PC from 2020.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#42

Post by Gigachad »

voidUpdate wrote: post #27
nylonstrung wrote: post #3

Consoles just don't make sense in any modern context. It's profoundly wasteful to have an edge device sitting in your living room, unused for 99% of the time that can only do an incredibly small subset of what a gaming computer can Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste Not to mention how bad the developer and porting experience is compared to PC/Steam Machine

People want the convenience. Generally , a console "just works", whereas a PC is more likely to need some messing about to get working optimally. Console devs have one target hardware that they can target, whereas PC games could be run on a huge variety of hardware

Valve has essentially fixed this in most aspects. My Steam Deck is as much of a "just works" experience as the switch. In fact I think it just works even easier because it automatically syncs my saves between my gaming desktop and it so I have the same saves when I travel.

Windows is a clusterfuck, but PC is larger than Windows. Anti cheat is a problem left to solve, but I think this is just a matter of time.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#44

Post by masklinn »

nylonstrung wrote: post #5
s_dev wrote: post #2

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future. I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines a…

TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with. There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

The 360 had 3 cores. The PS3 had a single core with vector coprocessors on a ring bus.

GPGPU is what displaced the Cell SPEs, and you wouldn’t count that as cores. In fact the PS3 originally didn’t include a GPU, the SPEs were supposed to handle it all, so in a way they were approaching the same solution from the opposite direction.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#45

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #20
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Game consoles" are a niche lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials with money to waste. (Like vinyl records.) Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.

This is hilariously incorrect and out-of-touch. Obviously phones are #1 by a huge margin, but the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream, and kids absolutely still play on them. Switch at 155 million sales, PS5 at 93 million, and under-20s have plenty of experience with hand-me-downs.

> the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream

Yes, like I said - lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials who have money now.

> ...and kids absolutely still play on them

The vast majority is kids playing their parents' console.

If the market wasn't being driven by parents' demand then no modern kid would be asking to buy a console. (They can play Roblox and Brawl Stars on their iPhone/iPad.)

Re: The console wars have been lost

#46

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #40
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That will be the game to get the entire world on their games consoles. Console gaming is like 15% of all gaming world-wide, and GTA 6 is like a single-digit slice of that 15% slice.

What you're missing is that gaming as a whole >10x'd since the genX/millennial heyday, so consoles are actually more popular than they were 20~30 years ago even if they are a smaller portion of the overall pie (PS2-as-a-DVD-player notwithstanding).

Yes, consoles are an expensive lifestyle item for millennials who have money now.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#47

Post by outime »

The Steam Deck (or a more modern equivalent) offers the best of both worlds. It's a gaming device that can play not only Steam games but also titles from other platforms (and emulate consoles). At the same time it doubles as a fully unlocked PC so you can do whatever you want with it - or simply use it like a traditional console if you prefer with a Dock and a controller (which could very well be a PS/XBOX one).

It's like a Nintendo Switch but much more capable. That said, I understand that non-tech-savvy or more casual gamers may not find the concept especially appealing. I suppose that would ultimately be a marketing challenge to solve.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#48

Post by charcircuit »

Consumers are WAY more price conscious than this author recognizes. Also it's strange to complain about the PS5's price increasing to $599.99 when the Steam Machine is $1,128. Almost double. There is no world the Steam Machine outsells the PS5 or PS6.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#49

Post by Gigachad »

mort96 wrote: post #25
s_dev wrote: post #2

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future. I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines a…

We're definitely way past the point where console hardware is vastly different from PC hardware; we're not in the age where what makes a console special is having a sprite processor which allows it to render graphics in a way that mainstream PC hardware is incapable of. It's all pretty much just x86 APUs from AMD, slightly customized compared to what you get off the shelf. However everything other than the hardware i…

>However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction or the system getting confused about window focus, issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs, just categorically can not exist.

This is exactly the problem Valve has solved. SteamOS presents a just works managed OS that is fully usable with a console controller. You hit the middle button on your game controller and the steam machine just turns on, wakes your TV, and switchs the input. The UX difference between Console and PC is shrinking to near zero.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#50

Post by stuxnet79 »

kakacik wrote: post #9
s_dev wrote: post #2

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future. I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines a…

That cell cpu made development a hell according to devs. Or SDK around, at the end it doesnt matter. Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW. What an arrogance that everybody paid for in final prices. Well, thats yesterday reality, arrogance of companies thinking they have en…

> Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.

I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.

It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.

If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.

Sony's hubris around the PS3 was very risky. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered) hardware.

Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.

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