Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future.
I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines are. The PlayStation 3 had the cell processor and was fundamentally different to PCs imo.
Nintendo has always seemed to manage stay as a console and seems to come out of the console wars stronger than either Sony or Microsoft, so they seem to be the exception here.
I really don't think having a custom CPU and hardware architecture different from PCs is the defining property of a gaming console. Nobody cares about that except developers and hardware nerds.
A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.
That cell cpu made development a hell according to devs. Or SDK around, at the end it doesnt matter. Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.
What an arrogance that everybody paid for in final prices. Well, thats yesterday reality, arrogance of companies thinking they have endless moat and can milk users forever is always eventually punished. Not losing sleep over them.
This behavior and inevitable result can be mapped into many other things, ie current german car manufacturing.
> Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.
I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.
It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.
If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.
Sony's hubris around the PS3 was ultimately their undoing. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered hardware).
We're definitely way past the point where console hardware is vastly different from PC hardware; we're not in the age where what makes a console special is having a sprite processor which allows it to render graphics in a way that mainstream PC hardware is incapable of. It's all pretty much just x86 APUs from AMD, slightly customized compared to what you get off the shelf.
However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction, or the system getting confused about window focus, or games which have controller support but whose launchers need mouse interaction -- issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs -- just categorically can not exist.
And they live in a completely different market. You have one mass produced computer which benefits from economies of scale, sold to a captive audience which has to buy games from the manufacturer. This allows completely different pricing strategies from non-console PCs where the manufacturer needs to make a significant profit on every device sold.
Then there's the developer angle. In the traditional desktop PC world, you have to work around performance quirks of many different GPU manufacturers and their drivers, and you're always in this careful balancing act where increasing graphics or CPU processing time by a little bit reduces your potential market. A console, representing exactly one hardware configuration owned by millions of people, allows much more extreme hardware utilization; you can consume every available CPU core, every available byte of memory, hit exactly 16.6ms frame times, and your game is gonna run at a smooth 60 FPS for everyone.
So yes, the computer science behind consoles is boring these days, they're "just PCs". But the market dynamics and developer implications mean they still have a place as a product that has a fundamentally different role than a traditional PC.
This is coming from someone who hasn't owned a console since the PS4 FWIW; I play my games on a Linux box with an Xbox controller in my living room.
The PS3 is one of a handful of systems that actually had a special processor. The NES and Genesis had common desktop CPUs. The PS1, 2 and N64 had MIPS processors which were in heavy use in workstations. GC, Wii, Xbox 360 had PowerPC. What was unusual was a special and temporary period from the 90s where “pc = x86 = basic” because everything else one way or another failed out of the market. That moment is passed and today all basic activity is done on arm based phones. Gaming is now one of the main niches of the x86, along with servers and corporate desktop. The special feature of the game console was always “we made these standards, we will commit to them for five years and sell a lot of units for you to ship games on.”
This more-or-less ended with 3D. The N64, mid-90s, had a novel 3D accelerator (heavily programmable, a kind of a proto-GPU). Its successor went with ATI. The Dreamcast had a PowerVR, which you could buy for your PC, and early iPhones had as well. Xbox had Nvidia. It has always been normal to find OTS parts. Never "IBM PC compatible" but again, the bubble itself is part of the core value proposition.
Honestly, we're dating ourselves with the premise.
There is exactly one generation (mid-90s) where the 3D accelerator design and industry hadn't stabilised. 3D then was like AI today. It was the rising thing. I wrote my first vertex shader on a GeForce 2.
They have common, off the shelf parts because it just isn't where the action is in 2026.
Consoles just don't make sense in any modern context. It's profoundly wasteful to have an edge device sitting in your living room, unused for 99% of the time that can only do an incredibly small subset of what a gaming computer can
Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste
Not to mention how bad the developer and porting experience is compared to PC/Steam Machine
I can accept the waste of having a second much lower power CPU in the phone I use with me every day. But I can't justify having both a gaming pc and a playstation/xbox that's exactly the same thing with a different OS on it. They even play the same games these days.
Something that weighs on me is the fact that every tech device you own is constantly devaluing as it ages, eventually becoming worthless when support ends and the servers are shut down. It makes far more sense to own the least possible and get the most use out of each one. Unlike most things you own that only devalue as they are worn out and damaged.
If only mobile devices had better external monitor support. It’s funny that iOS / macOS has by far the best controller experience from all devices pairing wise (even getting an Xbox controller to work properly on windows requires a dongle). iPad + controller just lacks games (and with emulators not even that, just good configuration).
> If only mobile devices had better external monitor support.
What I don’t get is modern phones are impressive. My iPhone from several years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and certain older Total War titles. So clearly the raw compute power and control limitations aren’t an issue (I doubt game companies care much about the latter at all now that RTS games made it consoles)
Yet I don’t see many interesting games available for mobile. It’s all copy/paste puzzle/gambling/idle/gacha crap.
Indeed. The platform is severely underused due to the economics. From more recent games I played Alien Isolation (works great, but I didn’t finish it), Monkey Island (iPad is perfect for point and clicks), X-Com was also perfect. The power is there.
apparently my two primary school kids are nobodies for enjoying their PS3 or RetroArch
and they don't have smartphone yet, if they do it will be heavily restricted, they can play games on PS3 or portable like SF2000, phone ain't gaming device
The thing I like about console compared to pc (which I use the most for gaming) is the total absence of cheaters except maybe a super minority.
To make an example try to play a multiplayer famous fps (like battlefield6 or cod) on console and then on pc, it's not even the same experience. On pc it is basically full of aimbotters, wallhackers, nodamagers, etc every single damn game, on console you get the actual safe experience. Sadly this is one of the reasons why I play mostly only pve games on pc
It makes sense as long as building hardware optimized for games is either significantly cheaper, or yields a better customer experience, than the available alternatives.
To most people, a separate gaming appliance is seen as convenience, not waste.
People want the convenience. Generally , a console "just works", whereas a PC is more likely to need some messing about to get working optimally. Console devs have one target hardware that they can target, whereas PC games could be run on a huge variety of hardware
I always find this argument pretty weak. Most of my household appliances are unused most of the time. And I very much value the fact that they're available for me if I want to use them. Why would I somehow want to give up that autonomy for my game console just because it happens to be connected to the internet?
I have gaming machines from the 80s that still work and that I still love. They're not e-waste.
That modern consoles find themselves oddly displaced is true to me also, but what is also true is that I have an Apple TV and a cable-co provided android tv box attached to my TV. Neither particularly emphasizes the gaming experience, but it seems like there is an unexplored technical space somewhere between an ARM box and a full PC that every console company but Nintendo seems afraid of.
I think they need to give up on the "best Graphics" feature point and focus on some other set of values. It's one they've lost every generation to PC GPUs, and ARM connected GPU's are perfectly capable of providing a good gaming experience. Most Steam games really don't require anything close to a bleeding edge GPU.
If consoles are lost, at least lost from Sony and XBox, it's because they decided not to compete in the space - there are still plenty of opportunities to explore.
They make sense to many people, even if not to you.
I'll take a one-function device over a general device any day. You switch it on, it does the thing, you switch it off. General purpose computers are the exception that proves the rule, in that "the thing" in their case _is_ everything.
I couldn't care less about playing with randos on the internet, but am very interested in playing with people I know in the same room.
I also think Steam was a game that had no choice but to win. AAA development costs have gotten so huge that even platform-exclusive developers find it burdensome, so they end up releasing on PC as well. And when that happens, Valve's value only grows. A console generation lasts about 8 years, but with Steam, once you buy a game, you can probably keep playing it until Gabe Newell dies. On top of that, CDs don't last as long as you'd think. Three years ago, I put an old game CD into a console, but the disc was damaged and wouldn't run. (It was a game called MH2.) In that sense, I think Steam is better because you can always restore your purchases.
>you can probably keep playing it until Gabe Newell dies
I remember Valve talking about the concern that if anything happens to Valve they have some contingency that basically releases your whole library to you without Steam DRM/etc.
I've never had a problem with any CDs, even my old Quake CD from about 30 years ago. Probably there's an issue with your drive or the disc wasn't stored well.
I've also never had a problem with any steam game I've purchased. I know in theory this could change at any time, but it's been 20 years now and it hasn't so they have earned some trust. Trust Playstation and Nintendo do not have.
> I fear for what happens when Gabe Newell retires and the MBA cancer fully infects Valve.
They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.
It's less about platforms and more about games themselves. Games on Steam has to follow certain rules that are mostly consumer-friendly. And the fear is that some of these rules will be relaxed to increase Steam's revenue, and as a result the store will be flooded with ad-ridden gatcha-slop that is completely saturated mobile.
The Steam Deck (or a more modern equivalent) offers the best of both worlds. It's a gaming device that can play not only Steam games but also titles from other platforms (and emulate consoles). At the same time it doubles as a fully unlocked PC so you can do whatever you want with it - or simply use it like a traditional console if you prefer with a Dock and a controller (which could very well be a PS/XBOX one).
It's like a Nintendo Switch but much more capable. That said, I understand that non-tech-savvy or more casual gamers may not find the concept especially appealing. I suppose that would ultimately be a marketing challenge to solve.
Consumers are WAY more price conscious than this author recognizes. Also it's strange to complain about the PS5's price increasing to $599.99 when the Steam Machine is $1,128. Over double. There is no world the Steam Machine outsells the PS5 or PS6.
Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, all that you can do is play Minecraft together. I was watching my (adult0 daughter play the new Subnautica, and would like to have joined in without having to go to a different room.
> The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well.
The Switch with its detachable two controllers always knew this.
Exactly. AAA games are not needed to have fun. I and my wife are having a lot of fun playing Dr. Mario or Street Fighter (the original one) on our 4K TV.
The rise in RAM and storage price means it's more costly and less viable to have a separate device from the PC or Mac you already have, dedicated to playing games.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] threadI will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines are. The PlayStation 3 had the cell processor and was fundamentally different to PCs imo.
Nintendo has always seemed to manage stay as a console and seems to come out of the console wars stronger than either Sony or Microsoft, so they seem to be the exception here.
A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.
What an arrogance that everybody paid for in final prices. Well, thats yesterday reality, arrogance of companies thinking they have endless moat and can milk users forever is always eventually punished. Not losing sleep over them.
This behavior and inevitable result can be mapped into many other things, ie current german car manufacturing.
I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.
It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.
If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.
Sony's hubris around the PS3 was ultimately their undoing. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered hardware).
However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction, or the system getting confused about window focus, or games which have controller support but whose launchers need mouse interaction -- issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs -- just categorically can not exist.
And they live in a completely different market. You have one mass produced computer which benefits from economies of scale, sold to a captive audience which has to buy games from the manufacturer. This allows completely different pricing strategies from non-console PCs where the manufacturer needs to make a significant profit on every device sold.
Then there's the developer angle. In the traditional desktop PC world, you have to work around performance quirks of many different GPU manufacturers and their drivers, and you're always in this careful balancing act where increasing graphics or CPU processing time by a little bit reduces your potential market. A console, representing exactly one hardware configuration owned by millions of people, allows much more extreme hardware utilization; you can consume every available CPU core, every available byte of memory, hit exactly 16.6ms frame times, and your game is gonna run at a smooth 60 FPS for everyone.
So yes, the computer science behind consoles is boring these days, they're "just PCs". But the market dynamics and developer implications mean they still have a place as a product that has a fundamentally different role than a traditional PC.
This is coming from someone who hasn't owned a console since the PS4 FWIW; I play my games on a Linux box with an Xbox controller in my living room.
Honestly, we're dating ourselves with the premise.
There is exactly one generation (mid-90s) where the 3D accelerator design and industry hadn't stabilised. 3D then was like AI today. It was the rising thing. I wrote my first vertex shader on a GeForce 2.
They have common, off the shelf parts because it just isn't where the action is in 2026.
Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste
Not to mention how bad the developer and porting experience is compared to PC/Steam Machine
So is your pc hardware, unless you expect to stay on that 9800x3d and 4090 for the next 30 years...
Just like every Android device or computer in your household? Are you trying to make a point for cloud computing?
Something that weighs on me is the fact that every tech device you own is constantly devaluing as it ages, eventually becoming worthless when support ends and the servers are shut down. It makes far more sense to own the least possible and get the most use out of each one. Unlike most things you own that only devalue as they are worn out and damaged.
Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.
> Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.
Imagine saying this before GTA 6 which will release only on consoles this year.
That will be the game to get the entire world on their games consoles.
What I don’t get is modern phones are impressive. My iPhone from several years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and certain older Total War titles. So clearly the raw compute power and control limitations aren’t an issue (I doubt game companies care much about the latter at all now that RTS games made it consoles)
Yet I don’t see many interesting games available for mobile. It’s all copy/paste puzzle/gambling/idle/gacha crap.
and they don't have smartphone yet, if they do it will be heavily restricted, they can play games on PS3 or portable like SF2000, phone ain't gaming device
To make an example try to play a multiplayer famous fps (like battlefield6 or cod) on console and then on pc, it's not even the same experience. On pc it is basically full of aimbotters, wallhackers, nodamagers, etc every single damn game, on console you get the actual safe experience. Sadly this is one of the reasons why I play mostly only pve games on pc
To most people, a separate gaming appliance is seen as convenience, not waste.
I have gaming machines from the 80s that still work and that I still love. They're not e-waste.
I think they need to give up on the "best Graphics" feature point and focus on some other set of values. It's one they've lost every generation to PC GPUs, and ARM connected GPU's are perfectly capable of providing a good gaming experience. Most Steam games really don't require anything close to a bleeding edge GPU.
If consoles are lost, at least lost from Sony and XBox, it's because they decided not to compete in the space - there are still plenty of opportunities to explore.
I'll take a one-function device over a general device any day. You switch it on, it does the thing, you switch it off. General purpose computers are the exception that proves the rule, in that "the thing" in their case _is_ everything.
I couldn't care less about playing with randos on the internet, but am very interested in playing with people I know in the same room.
I remember Valve talking about the concern that if anything happens to Valve they have some contingency that basically releases your whole library to you without Steam DRM/etc.
You are going to remember why you have PS5 in about 120 days.
“Man, Valve really does win by doing absolutely nothing while the rest of the industry shoots itself in the head.”
Good luck buying physical games on PC?
They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.
It's all corporate and cloud from here.
It's like a Nintendo Switch but much more capable. That said, I understand that non-tech-savvy or more casual gamers may not find the concept especially appealing. I suppose that would ultimately be a marketing challenge to solve.
The Switch with its detachable two controllers always knew this.
The Switch and Switch 2 are still great for this. And to bolster your point, they’re still selling like hotcakes and Nintendo is making gobs of money.
I think the boom in the board game industry has been a response to the death of co op video games.