This is an interesting take. Historically, the main benefits to console gaming were 2 things:
Consoles are cheaper than PCs
Games require no config and and are guaranteed to be compatible
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.
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.
This is an interesting take. Historically, the main benefits to console gaming were 2 things:
Consoles are cheaper than PCs
Games require no config and and are guaranteed to be compatible
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.
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.