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The console wars have been lost

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Re: The console wars have been lost

#61

Post by pjc50 »

Delphiza wrote: post #60

Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, al…

> The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well.

The Switch with its detachable two controllers always knew this.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#62

Post by mort96 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #33
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…

The PS3 is one of a handful of systems that actually had a special processor. The NES and Genesis had common desktop CPUs. The PS1, 2 and N64 had MIPS processors which were in heavy use in workstations. GC, Wii, Xbox 360 had PowerPC. What was unusual was a special and temporary period from the 90s where “pc = x86 = basic” because everything else one way or another failed out of the market. That moment is passed and t…

To my knowledge, all consoles until the Xbox 360 had normal CPUs, but very special graphics hardware. They were decidedly not typical PC hardware.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#63

Post by dv_dt »

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

That modern consoles find themselves oddly displaced is true to me also, but what is also true is that I have an Apple TV and a cable-co provided android tv box attached to my TV. Neither particularly emphasizes the gaming experience, but it seems like there is an unexplored technical space somewhere between an ARM box and a full PC that every console company but Nintendo seems afraid of.

I think they need to give up on the "best Graphics" feature point and focus on some other set of values. It's one they've lost every generation to PC GPUs, and ARM connected GPU's are perfectly capable of providing a good gaming experience. Most Steam games really don't require anything close to a bleeding edge GPU.

If consoles are lost, at least lost from Sony and XBox, it's because they decided not to compete in the space - there are still plenty of opportunities to explore.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#64

Post by dv_dt »

Delphiza wrote: post #60

Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, al…

Cutting the default hw setup to one controller was definitely MBA coded shortsightedness imo. It was de-incentivizing for living room multi-player modes in games, which in turn reduced a unique console advantage vs PC, all for a small savings in hardware.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#65

Post by mort96 »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #57
nylonstrung wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1] Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware. Perhaps the PS3 would h…

I'm sure there's some degree of just not being used to multi-threaded code, but it's also not like today's multi-threading. When we think about utilizing multiple cores today, we're thinking about running normal application code across many identical cores, within one process managed by a multi threaded kernel.

The PS3 wasn't like that. It was a single core machine, with one big CPU core which runs the operating system and your application, and it had a bunch of co-processors. I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.)

Re: The console wars have been lost

#66

Post by applfanboysbgon »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #46
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've repeated this baseless assertion three times now verbatim without adding any justification whatsoever for your beliefs that I think would self-evidently not survive contact with reality if you had any interaction with teenagers. From the statistics I can find, around 30% of console players are GenZ/GenA.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#67

Post by dv_dt »

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

And Sony by eliminating physical media, forces a whole set of online inconveniences onto gamers..

Re: The console wars have been lost

#68

Post by pllbnk »

Delphiza wrote: post #60

Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, al…

Exactly. AAA games are not needed to have fun. I and my wife are having a lot of fun playing Dr. Mario or Street Fighter (the original one) on our 4K TV.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#69

Post by cassianoleal »

mort96 wrote: post #53
Gigachad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 p…

Yeah, until you try to launch Trackmania and its launcher needs mouse input to function.

Valve has also solved that by incorporating trackpads to the controller. I bet the PS controllers's trackpads can also be used for that.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#70

Post by glimshe »

voidUpdate wrote: post #52
Gigachad wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Valve fixed it by making a console that plays PC games, rather than making a PC

But that's not the same. I'm heavy PC user but I only play games on a console. The reason is simple: zero friction.

I play games when I'm tired, so if I have to wait a minute for a Steam update (which happened a month ago on the rare day I wanted to play on my PC), I simply give up and go watch TV.

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