(Opinion piece) Hello, PC gaming here: Are the consoles OK? With sales dropping and confidence declining, how close are we to the end of consoles as we know them?
With sales dropping and confidence declining, how close are we to the end of consoles as we know them?
Consoles aren't going anywhere so long as GPU manufacturers keep scalping their userbase. A console costs less than just a GPU these days, with mostly comparable performance.
Mid-range GPUs still exist, they just dont get the same coverage as the top-end cards. An RTX 4060 is set at $300 which is much cheaper than a PS5 or Series X
$300 for the GPU only. You still need the rest of the PC to play games. The CPU will be at least $150 for anything that will run newer games basically at all, and then your RAM will be at least another $50. Now add on the case, fans, cooler, and any other accessories and for a mid-to-low range PC you've already passed the price of a premium console.
Steamdeck has shown that the age of the general purpose computer is very popular.
I think most people don't care how their games run, just that they run.
Consoles were a way to have games "work" out of the box, even if you didn't have a high powered computer. Now everyone has a high powered computer (phone).
Nintendo will never die, but I think open platforms like stramdeck with their HUGE libraries will be more popular until even cell phones take over that space.
I think most people don’t care how their games run, just that they run.
Honestly, this is why I game almost exclusively on console. I can download a game, press play, and it just works.
I have a Steam Deck too but I find myself not using it a lot. I loved it when I got it, but anymore it seems like there are just too many quirks(?) to make it an enjoyable experience. I swear even some verified games I have to do this tweak or that tweak to make it run right.
I'm married with kids and a house and 4 cars to maintain and when I get time to game I just want to play. I don't want to think about if there is something special I need to do or some driver I need to update or whatever.
Yeah as a PC gamer of several decades I feel like this is easily the biggest weakness of the platform.
The Steam Deck did a pretty good job of trying to make things easy but it sounds like it still has a ways to go. Hopefully things get better and we can all get a "best of both worlds" experience at least when it comes to handhelds.
I thought PS5 and switch were some of the best selling consoles of all time? Just because they are in the later part of their generation now doesn't change that.
This is an "article" in PC GAMER written by some "pC mAsTeR rAC3" lunatic. Who upvotes this crap?
I thought from the title it was obvious.
"Most profitable" just means it exists in the age where people who play FIFA and CoD are more milked for microtransactions. That line trends down when their hardware units sold do too. PS5 isn't seeing the growth rate Sony wanted given their investment, even with complete domination of their market segment. If everything were hunky-dory in PlayStation land, I doubt they'd bother to bring God of War, Spider-Man, and Horizon to PC at all. There's also the fact that PC over the past few years overtook consoles for where the most copies of games are sold, for most franchises anyway, which never used to be the case.
Computer only game bitch here: the PS5 is a marvel of technology especially at its price point and it’s amazing. I’m so happy for my console friends.
The PS4 and XBone were shit garbage boxes with slow ass hard drives and CPUs and I hate them.
I have every console from the 2600 to PS3/Wii/360. No way I’d get a PS4/Xbone. Three minute load times in Monster Hunter World is insulting.
Not sure I agree the premise of the article. Sales are going to be down when there are fewer AAA releases to drive hardware sales. It's taking longer and longer to develop those games and the budget required no longer justifies console exclusivity.
I think 2025 will be the real measure of console strength when the big releases are scheduled to come out.
Weird, I think the whole PC console game war was relevant when I was a kid and everything was new and cool, but I think at this point the whole "who's winning the console war" feels immature and is holding the industry back.
Like others have said, I don't really give a shit what content runs on, so as long as it runs. Better if things run well and I can take them with me like the deck.
You can make the argument about why it's better to play content on a PC but what's the point of the comparison? Why does it matter who is better? In an ideal world, everything would run great on affordable PCs that everyone has access to, but I don't think we're at that reality.
It's funny to me that we are not looking at the market beyond Sony Microsoft Nintendo.
Retro gaming handhelds for emulation are on the rise and large swaths of the market are gravitating to them. There is growth in gaming but it's actually a growth in piracy. No one likes the new stuff.
Any numbers you could share to show "large swaths of the market"?
This is an interesting take. Historically, the main benefits to console gaming were 2 things:
Nether of these is really the case anymore. For the price of a PS5 or a Series X you could get a midrange gaming PC with similar performance.
Regarding complexity, we kind of met in the middle. Long gone are the days when you could just pop a disc in the tray of your playstation or xbox and start playing, every game requires an install now. And on the PC side, you very rarely need to configure settings to get a game to a playable state. Hell, you dont really even need to manually install drivers anymore.
Of course, as the article points out, none of this applies to Nintendo and those consoles are still worth buying.
My guess for the future is that if Microsoft and Sony are going to hang around in the hardware space, they're going to make something akin to the steam deck, but locked to their own storefront. And then they'll wonder why people are still choosing PCs over their hardware.
First point is more true today than it was in the past. It is impossible to build a gaming pc for $400-500 that is capable of playing most modern games at high settings (without RT) and play at 60 fps. The gpu capable of doing that is around $300 by itself.
I think the longevity of consoles also plays a large part in their appeal. Knowing you can use the system to play at consistent performance levels for 7-8 years is a comforting thought.
For the PC side, I'm not sure about your point about drivers. Nvidia/AMD/Intel regularly release day 1 drivers to improve compatibility with new games.
A Radeon RX 6650 XT is like $230 and performs on par or better than the PS5's GPU. Pair that with a Zen-3-or-newer CPU like the Ryzen 5600 for < $130 that already outperforms the aging Zen 2 CPU in the PS5 and then you'll have to add 16 GB of RAM which can be had for < $40, a cheap mainboard (you probably don't care much about the feature set coming from a console anyway), PSU, SSD and case and you're probably at around $550 to $600.
Save $10 on pretty much every full price AAA title, benefit from more frequent and more aggressive sales, enjoy not having to pay $60 per year and you'll quickly arrive at a point where you actually paid less for PC gaming while having an experience that's at least on par if not superior in terms of graphical fidelity and performance.
It's a myth that PC hardware doesn't last as long as console hardware, especially nowadays. I know people who are playing current games with a GPU years older than a PS5 just fine. And when you start with hardware equal to or newer/superior to a console, you'll be able to run all games for that generation just fine.
Oh and don't start with the magic word "optimization". Optimization mostly involves improving code paths and removing complexity from scenes where it won't be noticed. These optimizations seamlessly transfer over to all ports including PC.
I think the “no config” part is missed on most lemmy users. I have buddies who can barely work their phone. They have consoles. They would be screwed trying to do pc gaming, it’s just too much. Drivers. Filesystems and paths. Cloud shit this, updates that. They just want to play.
He’ll, I know how to do everything and the notion of optimization turns me off. Being in your 40s and gaming is precious time where you don’t want to mess around with anything but your entertainment objective. Yeah consoles have some of those things but it’s more idiot proof and straightforward.
Preference. It is preference. It always was and it probably will be fir the foreseeable future. There are perks or arguments for either but imo you are either a PC-type or Console-type (subject to change over time lfc).
As a very new PC gamer, supplementing my long time Xbox gaming, the biggest advantage of consoles is that games always work OOTB (or OOTDownload).
Sometimes with PC gaming, a game just doesn't run for whatever reason, or you get crashes, or any other weird issues. Most people don't want to have to tinker in settings just to get consistent framerates.
Including myself, because I don't have a lot of time to play and I don't want to waste that time troubleshooting.
I'm over here questioning my sanity paying 20 dollars for a Half Life 2 mod that was made in the span of 10 years by some South Korean women.
Only to have to open up gcfscape and extract the audio such that the game doesn't crash and also emulate a graphics card.
Good game btw! It's a shame that modern graphics cards are losing support for directx9.
But like I get your point first hand. There are so many games on steam that just don't work anymore or in G-String's case. Don't work because the creator runs ancient windows 10 she refuses to update and has an older graphics card such that if it works on her machine it must work on your computer as well.
Edit: Also no the game is not sexual at all and the name G-String refers to a gene your character has that gives her psychic powers. It's also more like longer Half Life 2 if it had like 14-20 hours of content depending on how good or bad you are at the game.
Edit edit: Also a better example would be Max Payne 1 which requires you install a community made mod pack to play today and still buy.
Put me in the both camp. They’re fundamentally different experience and there are different games that I prefer to have on PS5 and other on PC
Oh yeah totally forgot to add this as an option. I should have put it like: Those are different things with different aspects to like/dislike about each.
Outside of handhelds, I don't really see the use-case of consoles anymore, to be honest.
I’d like to see how the switch 2 does before jumping to conclusions.
Everyone who wanted a console already got it.
PS 5 released 3.5 years ago, the switch is 7. xBox is only bought by… who the heck buys xBox anyways? It’s been bad since the xBOneS.
Switch2‘s gonna sell bad. Either due to naming or bad marketing or both. I fell like it’s gonna be like the 3DS was to the DS, or the N3DS to the 3DS.
