Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist?

The reson why consoles sell is because largely they "just work" Hook it to the TV pop in a disc and you are rivalling the arcade. No dealing with popups, driver incompatibility, installations, etc.

Why are consoles are popular for developers? Because if they write some super spiffy game for console X it will run on ALL of them since they all have the same hardware - no-brainer to buy, not too hard to support, etc.

Where if they write something for a PC you have to cross your fingers everyone knows what sort of system they have (even Aunt Edna buying little Tommy's Duke Nukem Forever game), that their system is relatively virus free, they have the proper controllers, a decent monitor, understand what it means when they need to update a driver, etc. etc.

As far as quality, a lot of folks, don't really care. As long as the game is reasonably fun and they can take it out of the box and have it playing in under a minute. Heck I appreciate the resolution of DVDs, but frankly I don't give a darn about blu-ray, the ability to see Leonardo DeCaprio's nose hairs doesn't make really make the movie all that more enjoyable to me. Only thing that sometimes compels me about blue ray may be some exclusive feature... But again, like consoles, most blue-ray stuff is also on DVD primarily because all the DVD and Blu-Ray folk can use it and there is better potential sales.

The bulk of the argument was than an appliance was designed (and often constrained) to doing the 'thing' it was designed to do, and a computer was designed to embrace doing many different things.

As the author points out, a game console is a computer which has sacrificed generality in order to achieve a cost advantage in the market where it competes. As the cost of generality goes down, the comparative advantage slowly evaporates.

An example of how this plays out is with robotics. You can consider your dishwasher to be a robot, it reacts to conditions (dishes, no dishes) it has various schemes for cleaning them, and that is pretty much what it does. A clothes washer is another robot of the genus 'washer' but works only on clothes. A general purpose robot could, in theory wash clothes, or dishes, and pretty much anything else if you programmed it to do so. So where do you draw the line between robot and appliance?

I posited the line was based on the relative cost/complexity advantage of one over another. When a computer was targeted to a particular task, and could do that task at a significant market cost advantage over the general purpose implementation, it went from being a 'computer' to being an 'appliance'.

Game consoles are appliances that play games, which is not to say that iPhones don't play games, but if you only want to play games then a console has a cost advantage over a phone.

A good example is Street Fighter. Street Fighter 3 was release for the CPS3 [0], a completely proprietary platform that ultimately only had 6 games released for it. Street Fighter 4 was on the Taito Type X2 [1], which is pretty much a PC.

[0] http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=799

[1] http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=903