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.
Cutting the default hw setup to one controller was definitely MBA coded shortsightedness imo. It was de-incentivizing for living room multi-player modes in games, which in turn reduced a unique console advantage vs PC, all for a small savings in hardware.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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, issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs, just categorically can not exist.
This is exactly the problem Valve has solved. SteamOS presents a just works managed OS that is fully usable with a console controller. You hit the middle button on your game controller and the steam machine just turns on, wakes your TV, and switchs the input. The UX difference between Console and PC is shrinking to near zero.
Of course games that don’t have controller support won’t work with controller. The steam store marks this with a label / rating system. If it’s for a green mark then everything will work with a controller.
It's a game with great controller support! I play it a lot with a controller. It's just that in the PC gaming space, "controller support" doesn't necessarily mean that you can log in to the launcher and launch the game without a keyboard and mouse. The assumption is that you always have a keyboard and mouse, and some people also happen to have a controller in addition.
I got a steam deck 2 years ago and I haven’t run in to any games like this. They all either skip the launcher or have a controller navigable one.
I just had a look at the steam page and valve has listed a long list of usability issues with this game. I guess if it was a console they could just reject it and make the devs fix the issues. But it’s still cleanly presented to the user that there’s issues here and up to them to decide what to do.
You can't seriously argue that using a keyboard/mouse interface using the controller track pad is as nice an experience as just using a controller-focused interface.
And since the Steam Machine doesn't come with a controller, I would bet that a large fraction of users will be using an xbox controller or something.
TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.
There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores
> There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores
First: One problem of the PS3 was that in a late stage of its development a (rather weak) GPU was "tacked on" (originally, the Cell was supposed to replace the GPU).
Now for your point:
Just have a look what scientists did on PS3 clusters using the SPUs of the Cell, and considering this imagine what creative things would have been possible for games on the PS3.
The problem was that at this time, game development got much less specific to one platform (in opposite to how it was for basically all the previous game console generations, though I am willing to admit that the original Xbox being very similar to a PC did give a hint concerning the direction the game industry was heading), so you wanted a much more "standardized" (typically meaning: similar to PC) architecture. The Xbox 360 was simply much more similar to PCs, so it was much easier to port engines from one platform to another.
> the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.
For previous console generations this was less of a problem (basically every console was quirky). It is easy to find statements of developers on the internet how the PS2 was magnitudes more of a nightmare to develop for than the PS3.
So, before, being difficult to develop for a console was much more accepted in consideration of the unique features each console brought to the table. What did change was rather the expectation among developers to be able to easily port engines between platforms.
Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]
Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.
Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.
I'm sure there's some degree of just not being used to multi-threaded code, but it's also not like today's multi-threading. When we think about utilizing multiple cores today, we're thinking about running normal application code across many identical cores, within one process managed by a multi threaded kernel.
The PS3 wasn't like that. It was a single core machine, with one big CPU core which runs the operating system and your application, and it had a bunch of co-processors. I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.)
The 360 had 3 cores. The PS3 had a single core with vector coprocessors on a ring bus.
GPGPU is what displaced the Cell SPEs, and you wouldn’t count that as cores. In fact the PS3 originally didn’t include a GPU, the SPEs were supposed to handle it all, so in a way they were approaching the same solution from the opposite direction.
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 very risky. 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.
Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.
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.
A game console is also locked down from the user, usually because the company is selling hardware at a loss, wants to maintain control, and wants to prevent cheating in online games. May also have exclusive games tied to the hardware.
The line is far more blurred now. The Steam Machine is a purpose built device streamlined for playing games. Yet without any hardware modifications you can put it on your desk and load windows on it. So it's clearly a PC too.
The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.
Locked down OS and hardware, or not usable for general compute for some other reason. 20 years ago you could have a gaming PC with discs like a console, but again the console was locked down.
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
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
Valve has essentially fixed this in most aspects. My Steam Deck is as much of a "just works" experience as the switch. In fact I think it just works even easier because it automatically syncs my saves between my gaming desktop and it so I have the same saves when I travel.
Windows is a clusterfuck, but PC is larger than Windows. Anti cheat is a problem left to solve, but I think this is just a matter of time.
Games update on consoles too. I’ve never been unable to play a game on my steamdeck because of an update. It just manages them automatically in the background.
But that's not the same. I'm heavy PC user but I only play games on a console. The reason is simple: zero friction.
I play games when I'm tired, so if I have to wait a minute for a Steam update (which happened a month ago on the rare day I wanted to play on my PC), I simply give up and go watch TV.
Console games need to update too. I don't know how the steam machine handles it, but steam downloads updates for my games in the background, so if it goes to sleep instead of doing a full power off, it might be able to keep games updated while you're not playing too
Yeah, but at least the XBOX sits in a low power mode that does updates and keeps the spot you were in your game saved. It's really transparent. I'm not saying Steam can't do that but it's not in the same league yet.
Steam does exactly that for me, thought when I'm casually using my computer, not when my computer has gone to sleep. But since Valve controls the whole steam machine ecosystem, I'd imagine it would be possible for the steam machine to do the same sleep-updates as xbox
Except they don't _need_ to update, it's just a manifestation of the the very PC-ification we're talking about. You used to pop the game in, press the on button, and be playing. At some point someone figured out that if PC gamers were willing ot put up with unfinished games being shipped, so would console gamers, and it was downhill from there.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is hilariously incorrect and out-of-touch. Obviously phones are #1 by a huge margin, but the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream, and kids absolutely still play on them. Switch at 155 million sales, PS5 at 93 million, and under-20s have plenty of experience with hand-me-downs.
> the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream
Yes, like I said - lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials who have money now.
> ...and kids absolutely still play on them
The vast majority is kids playing their parents' console.
If the market wasn't being driven by parents' demand then no modern kid would be asking to buy a console. (They can play Roblox and Brawl Stars on their iPhone/iPad.)
What you're missing is that gaming as a whole >10x'd since the genX/millennial heyday, so consoles are actually more popular than they were 20~30 years ago even if they are a smaller portion of the overall pie (PS2-as-a-DVD-player notwithstanding).
You've repeated this baseless assertion three times now verbatim without adding any justification whatsoever for your beliefs that I think would self-evidently not survive contact with reality if you had any interaction with teenagers. From the statistics I can find, around 30% of console players are GenZ/GenA.
> 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.
Proton is already good enough that you don’t need SteamOS. I’m not that much of a gamer so my numbers are hardly representative, but about 90% of video games I tried ran with zero issues through Heroic Launcher and GE-Proton. The ability to install SteamOS on your own hardware is nice, but largely irrelevant. It was Valve’s previous work on Proton which was important.
The bigger fear is of course Valve itself. They have many, many levers they could turn to squeeze their audience. This is of course a terrible long-term decision—Valve being a good steward is why PC gamers largely don’t even bother to learn what other online storefronts offer—but long-term planning is irrelevant if you’re a CEO who’s looking for a new yacht and to lateral away after 3 years of record profits.
@edit: admittedly there is something to be said about the "I don’t _want_ a PC experience, I just want to play the games on my couch" crowd. Being able to set up SteamOS on your own hardware _is_ nice, I just don’t think it’s relevant to any post-Gaben enshittification.
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.
The argument is that physical media was the one benefit consoles had. If you’re just buying a locked down, non-upgradable, low performance PC disguised as a console (without access to the superior Steam storefront), why not just get a PC?
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. Almost double. There is no world the Steam Machine outsells the PS5 or PS6.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Cutting the default hw setup to one controller was definitely MBA coded shortsightedness imo. It was de-incentivizing for living room multi-player modes in games, which in turn reduced a unique console advantage vs PC, all for a small savings in hardware.
Even my Super Nintendo with Street Fighter II pack-in only included a single controller. Christmas day was fun but not as fun as it could have been.
I guess they were hoping to sell additional controllers..
> 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.
> when games stopped with local co-op
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.
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.
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.”
To my knowledge, all consoles until the Xbox 360 had normal CPUs, but very special graphics hardware. They were decidedly not typical PC hardware.
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.
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.
>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, issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs, just categorically can not exist.
This is exactly the problem Valve has solved. SteamOS presents a just works managed OS that is fully usable with a console controller. You hit the middle button on your game controller and the steam machine just turns on, wakes your TV, and switchs the input. The UX difference between Console and PC is shrinking to near zero.
Yeah, until you try to launch Trackmania and its launcher needs mouse input to function.
Of course games that don’t have controller support won’t work with controller. The steam store marks this with a label / rating system. If it’s for a green mark then everything will work with a controller.
It's a game with great controller support! I play it a lot with a controller. It's just that in the PC gaming space, "controller support" doesn't necessarily mean that you can log in to the launcher and launch the game without a keyboard and mouse. The assumption is that you always have a keyboard and mouse, and some people also happen to have a controller in addition.
I got a steam deck 2 years ago and I haven’t run in to any games like this. They all either skip the launcher or have a controller navigable one.
I just had a look at the steam page and valve has listed a long list of usability issues with this game. I guess if it was a console they could just reject it and make the devs fix the issues. But it’s still cleanly presented to the user that there’s issues here and up to them to decide what to do.
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Valve has also solved that by incorporating trackpads to the controller. I bet the PS controllers's trackpads can also be used for that.
You can't seriously argue that using a keyboard/mouse interface using the controller track pad is as nice an experience as just using a controller-focused interface.
And since the Steam Machine doesn't come with a controller, I would bet that a large fraction of users will be using an xbox controller or something.
TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.
There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores
> There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores
First: One problem of the PS3 was that in a late stage of its development a (rather weak) GPU was "tacked on" (originally, the Cell was supposed to replace the GPU).
Now for your point:
Just have a look what scientists did on PS3 clusters using the SPUs of the Cell, and considering this imagine what creative things would have been possible for games on the PS3.
The problem was that at this time, game development got much less specific to one platform (in opposite to how it was for basically all the previous game console generations, though I am willing to admit that the original Xbox being very similar to a PC did give a hint concerning the direction the game industry was heading), so you wanted a much more "standardized" (typically meaning: similar to PC) architecture. The Xbox 360 was simply much more similar to PCs, so it was much easier to port engines from one platform to another.
> the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.
For previous console generations this was less of a problem (basically every console was quirky). It is easy to find statements of developers on the internet how the PS2 was magnitudes more of a nightmare to develop for than the PS3.
So, before, being difficult to develop for a console was much more accepted in consideration of the unique features each console brought to the table. What did change was rather the expectation among developers to be able to easily port engines between platforms.
Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]
Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.
Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.
[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn
I'm sure there's some degree of just not being used to multi-threaded code, but it's also not like today's multi-threading. When we think about utilizing multiple cores today, we're thinking about running normal application code across many identical cores, within one process managed by a multi threaded kernel.
The PS3 wasn't like that. It was a single core machine, with one big CPU core which runs the operating system and your application, and it had a bunch of co-processors. I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.)
The 360 had 3 cores. The PS3 had a single core with vector coprocessors on a ring bus.
GPGPU is what displaced the Cell SPEs, and you wouldn’t count that as cores. In fact the PS3 originally didn’t include a GPU, the SPEs were supposed to handle it all, so in a way they were approaching the same solution from the opposite direction.
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 very risky. 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.
Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.
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.
A game console is also locked down from the user, usually because the company is selling hardware at a loss, wants to maintain control, and wants to prevent cheating in online games. May also have exclusive games tied to the hardware.
And as a result, the PS5 is less than half the price of a Steam Machine with similar performance.
The line is far more blurred now. The Steam Machine is a purpose built device streamlined for playing games. Yet without any hardware modifications you can put it on your desk and load windows on it. So it's clearly a PC too.
The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.
Doesn't seem blurry to me, Steam Machine is just a PC.
What is the definition of a console then? At this point it’s just a pc that runs a locked down OS.
Back 20 years ago the distinction was just obvious.
Locked down OS and hardware, or not usable for general compute for some other reason. 20 years ago you could have a gaming PC with discs like a console, but again the console was locked down.
This just illustrates the article point. We have come to the point where a console is just a worse less useful version of a PC.
Steam OS will replicate the nice TV UX of consoles but not be locked down.
I'd say the opposite: Steam Machine is a console than can run Windows.
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
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
Valve has essentially fixed this in most aspects. My Steam Deck is as much of a "just works" experience as the switch. In fact I think it just works even easier because it automatically syncs my saves between my gaming desktop and it so I have the same saves when I travel.
Windows is a clusterfuck, but PC is larger than Windows. Anti cheat is a problem left to solve, but I think this is just a matter of time.
It "just works", unless it's time for a patch for that game. Which 98% of the time.
Games update on consoles too. I’ve never been unable to play a game on my steamdeck because of an update. It just manages them automatically in the background.
Valve fixed it by making a console that plays PC games, rather than making a PC
But that's not the same. I'm heavy PC user but I only play games on a console. The reason is simple: zero friction.
I play games when I'm tired, so if I have to wait a minute for a Steam update (which happened a month ago on the rare day I wanted to play on my PC), I simply give up and go watch TV.
Console games need to update too. I don't know how the steam machine handles it, but steam downloads updates for my games in the background, so if it goes to sleep instead of doing a full power off, it might be able to keep games updated while you're not playing too
Yeah, but at least the XBOX sits in a low power mode that does updates and keeps the spot you were in your game saved. It's really transparent. I'm not saying Steam can't do that but it's not in the same league yet.
Steam does exactly that for me, thought when I'm casually using my computer, not when my computer has gone to sleep. But since Valve controls the whole steam machine ecosystem, I'd imagine it would be possible for the steam machine to do the same sleep-updates as xbox
I don’t think anyone has the steam machine to test this stuff yet but I can’t see any reason it can’t do exactly the same thing.
Except they don't _need_ to update, it's just a manifestation of the the very PC-ification we're talking about. You used to pop the game in, press the on button, and be playing. At some point someone figured out that if PC gamers were willing ot put up with unfinished games being shipped, so would console gamers, and it was downhill from there.
Well yes, but if we are assuming that console games need to update, pc games would also need to update
And Sony by eliminating physical media, forces a whole set of online inconveniences onto gamers..
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.
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
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.
> Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste
Just like every Android device or computer in your household? Are you trying to make a point for cloud computing?
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.
The servers in clouds get "retired" too.
> Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste
So is your pc hardware, unless you expect to stay on that 9800x3d and 4090 for the next 30 years...
4090 probably won't survive, but I could see 9800x3d still being usable.
Modern chips rarely last that long.
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.
"Game consoles" are a niche lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials with money to waste. (Like vinyl records.)
Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.
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).
Article author is an example
This is hilariously incorrect and out-of-touch. Obviously phones are #1 by a huge margin, but the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream, and kids absolutely still play on them. Switch at 155 million sales, PS5 at 93 million, and under-20s have plenty of experience with hand-me-downs.
> the console market is as large as it's ever been as gaming as a whole became genuinely mainstream
Yes, like I said - lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials who have money now.
> ...and kids absolutely still play on them
The vast majority is kids playing their parents' console.
If the market wasn't being driven by parents' demand then no modern kid would be asking to buy a console. (They can play Roblox and Brawl Stars on their iPhone/iPad.)
This comment is peak HN.
> 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.
> That will be the game to get the entire world on their games consoles.
Console gaming is like 15% of all gaming world-wide, and GTA 6 is like a single-digit slice of that 15% slice.
What you're missing is that gaming as a whole >10x'd since the genX/millennial heyday, so consoles are actually more popular than they were 20~30 years ago even if they are a smaller portion of the overall pie (PS2-as-a-DVD-player notwithstanding).
Yes, consoles are an expensive lifestyle item for millennials who have money now.
You've repeated this baseless assertion three times now verbatim without adding any justification whatsoever for your beliefs that I think would self-evidently not survive contact with reality if you had any interaction with teenagers. From the statistics I can find, around 30% of console players are GenZ/GenA.
> 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.
Proton is already good enough that you don’t need SteamOS. I’m not that much of a gamer so my numbers are hardly representative, but about 90% of video games I tried ran with zero issues through Heroic Launcher and GE-Proton. The ability to install SteamOS on your own hardware is nice, but largely irrelevant. It was Valve’s previous work on Proton which was important.
The bigger fear is of course Valve itself. They have many, many levers they could turn to squeeze their audience. This is of course a terrible long-term decision—Valve being a good steward is why PC gamers largely don’t even bother to learn what other online storefronts offer—but long-term planning is irrelevant if you’re a CEO who’s looking for a new yacht and to lateral away after 3 years of record profits.
@edit: admittedly there is something to be said about the "I don’t _want_ a PC experience, I just want to play the games on my couch" crowd. Being able to set up SteamOS on your own hardware _is_ nice, I just don’t think it’s relevant to any post-Gaben enshittification.
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.
Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite are all my kids play. Everything else is fighting for scraps it feels like. Not to mention a million mobile games.
Microsoft has destroyed Xbox and Windows.
It's all corporate and cloud from here.
> My husband and I both can't remember why we even got a PS5 in the first place
You are going to remember why you have PS5 in about 120 days.
Why? Sorry about my ignorance, but what will happen in about 120 days?
I think its a reference to GTA 6 releasing
“If I can't give people physical games as gifts anymore, why should I bother buying the new console?”
“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?
The argument is that physical media was the one benefit consoles had. If you’re just buying a locked down, non-upgradable, low performance PC disguised as a console (without access to the superior Steam storefront), why not just get a PC?
Lower up-front cost and hardware longevity are the two major ones. Whenever GTA VI launches on PC, good luck running it on your $500 PC from 2020.
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. Almost double. There is no world the Steam Machine outsells the PS5 or PS6.
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.
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.
As you said, it could be that I didn't store it properly, or it could be an issue with the CD reader on the old console.
>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.
If that's true, when they sell out to private equity, that'll be the first thing private equity deletes.
cool!
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