Been trying to convert my friends since 1998.
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.
never came out
Seen the news lately?
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.
Hell, I use my Legion Go to stream from my desktop to my TV more than I boot up the game console attached to the TV. Even my wife, very vaguely a gamer, prefers the PC. She’s even a bit of a keyboard snob these days.
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.
Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.
Obviously, and I’m saying that’s an extremely small amount of control, for which you give up a lot of other control to have.
“Straightforward” or not, it’s well-trod territory, and devs don’t do their homework on a doing a good job before putting games out. I don’t just mean absurdly basic niceties like rebinding (which is frankly only difficult if your game input is built wrong), but mechanics like deadzones, trigger response handling, aim reticle behavior, and so on. All these are things I frequently need to adjust from outside of games, because we simply can’t rely on developers to do quality work, nor to correct things afterward. Building new input schemes is also occasionally useful, eg Curse of the Dead Gods used a dumb weapon switching mechanic on controller, but I was able to build a more reasonable swap-button mechanic on top of it, and share it so anyone else running through Steam can load that config to play that way. It’d be nicer if devs listened and did it themselves, but they couldn’t be bothered, even though they already built the kbm input to work the right way.
I’ve had one Steam game delicensed the past ten years or so, and I got it replaced later. I couldn’t easily count the number of games I’ve changed in one way or another, but I’ve got a couple thousand hours playing controller in a game with no support whatsoever, so the control I have over my how games play seems a pretty big deal ;) Off-Steam, there was Ubisoft taking The Crew away from owners. How’s your physical copy of that running for you? Oh, right, it doesn’t run for anyone, at least aside from PC people working on modding in replacement servers.
I’m just saying, there’s a lot more to it all than “game runs”.
You’ll pry my physical devices from my cold dead hands.
I no longer have a computer, desk or lap, with a physical media drive. I have a plug in dvd-rom and a plug in 3.5" floppy drive so I can still(before the inevitable rot happens) use the hard copies of…every game I’ve ever owned worth keeping…I need to recap my ps1 and SNES…hmm
When consoles went online that was pretty much it for me. They had been cheaper and easier casual gaming thing but that kinda disapeared. The switch had something since you got the gaming on the go thing but the steamdeck is the thing for me now and I doubt I will go back as it is the only thing to bring me back to something like a console.
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.
I’ve been gaming on the PC since the 386 days and I don’t ever recall a time where a PC was ever cheaper than a console.
With new parts yes, but except for a brief period after a new console is released you can buy used PC parts for playing games of similar graphically fidelity for about the same price or slightly cheaper.
