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.
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.