The console war ended and Sony didn’t notice. They won, for whatever it’s worth. But developers haven’t targeted individual machines in a while.
This was blatant early in the PS3 / 360 divide. The 360 acted like a generic Windows / DirectX machine, even moreso than the literal Pentium 3 PC they shipped prior. The PS3 was a novel and tremendously powerful unicorn that nobody bothered with. At least, not until Sony helped devs treat it like any other compiler target.
Everything since then has been a blue AMD laptop versus a green AMD laptop. Nintendo dodged it for a bit, because Nintendo is a toy company that happens to be in the video game market, and their fixation on novelty avoids direct competition. But even they eventually tacked goofy controllers onto an Android tablet and printed money by being the only console you can play on a bus. All of the Switch games that aren’t theirs exist because it’s just another computer. Everything is… or it’s doomed.
Microsoft’s weird moves with Xbox reflect this. They saw it coming. It’s arguably why they got into consoles, at all. They wanted to computerify that market so that they could push Windows on more people. That… kinda happened? But honestly it was coming even if they’d done nothing. RenderWare abstracted the graphics interface for Dreamcast, PS2, and PC, leading major engine-centric PC devs to release shooters on console, and allowing Rockstar to sell a zillion copies of assorted GTA games. The fight was already over, by the time EA ate RenderWare alive. Every publisher wanted to be on every platform to reach every customer.
Qualitative differences became an obstacle to that goal, and slowly disappeared.
I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.
I’ve been saying for a while that Microsoft’s best bet from here is to turn the Xbox into a Windows box, update Windows to work decently on handhelds, and launch an Xbox portable. Kill the console/PC distinction and leave Sony flat-footed to compete with Nintendo.
The only challenge to this approach is Valve beating them to it from the other direction.
What’s stopping you from building your own Bazzite Box right now? (ChimeraOS is great too. ) Honestly, the things that make me most excited are
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the combined rumors of Valve developing for Arm and
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the Asahi Linux presentation from Alyssa Rosenzweig that shows you can run modern games from steam on Linux on arm mac NOW. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/aaa-gaming-on-m1.html
Valve’s first party custom hardware is coming.
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What a great closing quote:
Who won? AMD
AMD definitely won the console hardware race. The real arms race has always been to create an immersive experience and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
But what news of the console legs race?
Only the Virtual Boy qualified.
It’s neck and neck.
Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.
Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.
In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.
While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don’t see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they’ve proven time and time again that they’re hostile towards their fanbase (and I’m not talking about pirated games here).
I also don’t see how the Switch brought a “fresh, intuitive control scheme” to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of “Pro” controllers.
And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we’re at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most “revolutionary” title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn’t much in there that truly surprised me.
YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn’t something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.
I personally think indie games or games from “large-but-based” studios are more important than ever and that’s where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.
While Fortnite, League and Genshin have quietly mopped the floor.
If they could only do something innovative and fun.
It could even earn lots of money, but I guess the 1% risk is just too much.
Yes, but if they don’t participate in this arms race then it will be too easy to emulate their hardware and it will be their own fault when people pirate their games. This is what I’ve gathered from reading opinions on Nintendo hardware here on Lemmy.
The other console makers put their games on PC already. That you can pirate Nintendo games on PC and run them better than if you bought them legitimately is further evidence that the console exclusive model doesn’t make sense anymore.
What nintendo needs to do is release games on pc. I would not pirate their games if i could buy them.
People have been saying “Nintendo should release their games for Platform That I Like” for decades. Pretty sure they’re content with doing what they’re been doing.
You’re not wrong, but we’ve seen time and time again that piracy decreases with improved access. Look at what Spotify and netflix did to curb piracy.
This might be a broader conversation, but i see traditional consoles dying off soon. Look at xbox and playstations entrance into the pc market via online streaming.
I dont doubt theyre content suing the pants off creators showing emulation of games that havent been for sale for decades, but they are undoubtably anti-consumer at this point.
I see no point in shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a switch with a quarter of the computing power of my steamdeck, much less my pc.
