“Everyone keep buying our console even though we keep raising the price. No? Fine, we’ll keep all the games just for our platform, surely that will get you to buy a PS5.”
Once upon a time, video game consoles offered the convenience of plug-and-play gaming, and living room comfort.
Not everyone wanted to build a PC and play with keyboard and mouse, and even still playing those PC games can be a hassle to set up on a TV if you’re common-denominator-levels of tech unsavvy. (Read: not the average Lemmy user)
Valve has brought that forward some with Steam Deck and eventually steam machine but by and large most PC gamers are Windows users.
That said, console platforms have gotten so increasingly hostile towards customers between pricing, licensing, download times and walled-garden tactics that they’ve painted themselves out of an increasing chunk of the games market.
People would rather set up a computer and a controller than buy a console, and it’s the corpo’s own fault.
People generally buy consoles because they are very simple, plug-n-play devices. Historically, they’ve also been able to produce cutting edge graphics for cheaper than a gaming PC, and although that price gap has narrowed over time I do still think it’s true by a bit. (People like to point out that this is not true when taking into account the average price of games on console vs PC, which is completely valid, but I’m talking about the hardware alone here)
From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.
From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.
As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.
“Everyone keep buying our console even though we keep raising the price. No? Fine, we’ll keep all the games just for our platform, surely that will get you to buy a PS5.”
How else would they? Honest question: what do any of the video game consoles have to offer except exclusivity?
Once upon a time, video game consoles offered the convenience of plug-and-play gaming, and living room comfort.
Not everyone wanted to build a PC and play with keyboard and mouse, and even still playing those PC games can be a hassle to set up on a TV if you’re common-denominator-levels of tech unsavvy. (Read: not the average Lemmy user)
Valve has brought that forward some with Steam Deck and eventually steam machine but by and large most PC gamers are Windows users.
That said, console platforms have gotten so increasingly hostile towards customers between pricing, licensing, download times and walled-garden tactics that they’ve painted themselves out of an increasing chunk of the games market.
People would rather set up a computer and a controller than buy a console, and it’s the corpo’s own fault.
People generally buy consoles because they are very simple, plug-n-play devices. Historically, they’ve also been able to produce cutting edge graphics for cheaper than a gaming PC, and although that price gap has narrowed over time I do still think it’s true by a bit. (People like to point out that this is not true when taking into account the average price of games on console vs PC, which is completely valid, but I’m talking about the hardware alone here)
From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.
From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.
As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.
Let’s raise the price of the console by hundreds of dollars just to sweeten the deal!
Indies and AA games on PC ftw.
PC prices are also going up by hundreds of dollars. Look at what RAM and storage are doing.