I see where he's coming from, as when cross-play isn't available niche online games can die quickly and exclusives are annoying, but if there was only one platform holder, that status would quickly be exploited with high online fees and tighter controls of how games are purchased/resold.
Everyone on Steam Deck, fuck these shitty walled gardens.
With the itty bitty tiny text? I love my deck but damn it doesn't work with my old man eyes.
They invented these things called reading glasses, have you heard of them? Anyway, PC mouse and keyboard is king, but we're talking console format here i think, and a PC console is better than a walled garden console.
Wow, that's a kind of dismissal that only those who have no idea how bad it gets can wield. Reading glasses help with clarity, but clarity is not the only issue with old eyes and other visual impairment. Sometimes you just plain need things bigger.
One day you'll look back on this exchange and cringe at the kind of person you used to be. Be better. Accessibility is important.
Signed, someone who's needed full-time prescription glasses for 35+ years and only recently started having to read small print on food and medicine containers with the zoom on my phone camera.
I'm okay with this on the condition that that platform is PC.
Even that might become an x86-64 vs ARM divide.
Especially if resellable physical games became widely available on PC again. In my eyes, that's the biggest advantage consoles still have.
The biggest advantage that consoles have is that you turn them on and start playing games.
No research process, no assembling components, no installing drivers, just actual gaming.
It's been a long time since that was the case though. Now you have to update the console, update the controller firmware, install the game, and update the game.
True though you have to do all those with PC as well, consoles are still a streamlined experience in comparison
Sure, but they're approaching a convergence. PCs have gotten easier and consoles have become less streamlined. With something like the Steam Deck, it's even more blurred.
Steam is legitimately easier and faster to get games going on than my PS4 these days IMO. Library is laid out alot better and there's no signing in whenever I turn on a controller. Its still easier to do local multiplayer on PS4, but not by much.
and there’s no signing in whenever I turn on a controller
Can you not sync your account to a specific controller on Playstation? Xbox has that for a while, though the whole software experience has generally been Xbox's strong suit imho
Don't know on PS5, but definitely not on PS4
While only the Steam Deck has achieved massive success, it shows there are ways to reduce the prep time for PC gaming, to almost as little as modern consoles (since you do, ultimately, have to install drivers on console.)
Well, three of the top four are PC. Two of those just have locked down drm ridden crapware operating systems.
By that logic the remaining one is also PC with a locked down crapware system (Switch is ARM, people have gotten Android running)
Don't forget RISC-V, it's really the future i think. Anyone who doesn't want to live under the yoke of proprietary architectures, this looks to be the only alternative to the status quo.
If I was seeing RISC-V get widespread adoption in consumer-grade hardware, I'd be thinking about it (granted, having X86-64 and ARM on the market could make room for a third competitor compared to the 15-year x86 hegemony.) But I don't see a push for that, and there probably won't be unless RISC-V delivers better results than ARM. Keep in mind that you and I probably care more about CPU architecture than the average gamer.
I’m okay with this on the condition that that platform is PC.
You want developers to choose a specific set of hardware requirements and only develop games to target and work on that specific set of hardware specifications?
That sounds like a bad idea all around.
PC is an open platform and not a "specific set" of hardware requirements.
Do you even know what a personal computer is?
The context appears to be mainly about how having to develop for different consoles/hardware configurations/etc makes development harder. So, choosing PC as the "platform" in this context would be the worst possible option to choose.
And I wish Square Enix (among others) didn't charge 80€ for their AAA titles. If there was no competition, prices would probably be even worse.
A single console is one of those things that sounds great on paper, but considering how scummy the industry has been lately, would be used in the most anti-consumer way possible.
A single console on the market = Monopoly. Those are never good for consumers.