I think console gaming hit the top of the curve years ago. Sure profits are bigger numbers, but inflation has halved the spending power of a dollar and it’s really hard to tell what’s worth more anymore. With that kind of uncertainty, it’s hard to declare what we’re experiencing now as surprising. They have had consoles on life support for at least 20 years now. Originally you needed the console, game, and a data hookup ( phone line) at most. Now you have to buy the 3rd revision of the console, have the gold subscription, make sure you’re buying the remastered version of the game you want, have an account with the publisher, ads the whole way, do i need to go on? It’s crazy we don’t stop and look at where we have gotten. Instead we’re like, but what if we added AI to this mix, that will fix it! And the cycle continues.
Meanwhile; Valve is literally drowning in money - they have to run sales so the inflow is slower - to clear away all the money. You don’t even need a PC anymore to play. Their 300$ handheld is as powerful as a 700$ rip-off laptop from what used to be a trustworthy brand. We may live in a capitalist genocidist technological hellscape, but at least Valve never broke. I’m actually happy HL3 never came out.
After getting a Steam Deck my Switch is just collecting dust and that even though I would still like to play on it since it’s a lot lighter and more portable. Unfortunately it’s just a horrible deal to buy games locked to one platform at a higher price than their PC counterpart without getting any of the benefits (modding, free cloud saves across devices).
I’m only willing to buy the switch version if I really want to support the developers e.g. Celeste or Stardew Valley.
I mean, nowadays consoles are just a PC with glasses and a moustache… It’d be great if we moved away from physical consoles and more towards digital platforms so that the gaming industry is less fragmented.
Basically officially supported and updated roms/emulators. Or just skip that and make Nintendo and such something akin to Steam.
I wouldnt buy a “digital only” platform service if they started paying me for it. No way in hell am I giving up what little control I still have over my physical console.
It’s funny to talk about “keeping control” because you can put a disk in a device that completely locks down every aspect of the game environment. PC offers generally way more control over games, allows more games, etc.
And there’s GOG to buy from if one doesn’t want Steam’s potential ability to delicense a purchase, but I’d be playing games through Steam either way because of it’s ability to tweak and rebuild controller handling for each game. I’m picky and a lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers, so having that extra control over the experience is a major plus to me.
Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.
“A lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers” - making a game work for keyboards and controllers, and even more so allowing keys to be rebound, isn’t super straightforward. I make games in my spare time, so I encounter this all the time.
I hope we get another time where you can build a PC that matches or surpasses the latest consoles, at a lower cost. It’s been a while.
When has that ever been the case?
The age-old tradeoff has always been that consoles are restrictive and un-upgradable, but generally cheaper than building a PC due to fixed parts costs and loss-leader strategies.
PS3 era. $600 for the PS3 or ~$500 for a PC that performed similarly if you just wanted to play games and not also include an expensive ass Blu-ray drive.
So what you’re saying is it was possible to undercut the ps3 in cost of you weren’t building a machine of equivalent capability.
