I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.
I’ve been saying for a while that Microsoft’s best bet from here is to turn the Xbox into a Windows box, update Windows to work decently on handhelds, and launch an Xbox portable. Kill the console/PC distinction and leave Sony flat-footed to compete with Nintendo.
The only challenge to this approach is Valve beating them to it from the other direction.
MA is headed there. They are moving all of their office suite apps off x86 and into webview, which means they are platform agnostic.
I see them taking another stab at pushing ARM windows again. Maybe the Xbox mobile will be their flagship.
I see them taking another stab at pushing ARM windows again. Maybe the Xbox mobile will be their flagship.
Maybe Steam will launch a phone in the near future?🤞
I like Steam because they are more upfront about what you get when you "buy" a game, but I don't want Steam to become a mega corpo that has tentacles in every technological industries just like Google or Microsoft.
They still are a company first and foremost, and Gaben isn't eternal. Their attitude can change as fast as getting a new CEO when Gaben steps down.
Nothing good comes out of a mega corpo getting bigger, and we have many examples of that.
But you don't think a challenge to the duopoly of Android and iPhone would be a good thing?
Yes, but not by another mega corpo that tries to get into everything.
I mean, the real problem is that Alphabet and Apple should be dismantled in littles companies by anti-trust laws. Adding another third big player will only add another corpo to the duopoly.
Steam Deck put them back in the race already.
SteamOS is flourishing with the popularity of the Deck, helping Linux to become a stable gaming platform with Proton and driver support.
It’s also great as a HTPC when connected to a TV. HDR support for external displays arrived just recently.
I think it’s just a matter of time SteamOS jumping from Deck to custom PC builds.
What's stopping you from building your own Bazzite Box right now? (ChimeraOS is great too. ) Honestly, the things that make me most excited are
the combined rumors of Valve developing for Arm and
the Asahi Linux presentation from Alyssa Rosenzweig that shows you can run modern games from steam on Linux on arm mac NOW. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/aaa-gaming-on-m1.html
Valve's first party custom hardware is coming.
I can build a new PC or whatnot, but one thing that has helped the Deck along is that it's established a clear standardized set of specs that some developers have chosen to build for. Obviously there have been plenty of games that won't run on the deck, but sites like ProtonDB basically create a sticker for "this runs well on the Deck."
When they announced Steam Machines the first time, I thought it was a great idea because it would give PC devs a sort of baseline system to aim for, and then I was surprised when they launched and they were all sorts of different system specs. I'm still convinced that's at least partly why they failed - if you buy a console like a Playstation or XBOX, part of the appeal is that you know exactly what you're getting and what will run on it. If it says 'PS5', it'll run on your PS5.
So hopefully if they try again it'll be something along those lines, kind of like the Steam Deck.
We have a steam box though. It's called a steam deck via HDMI out with a controller
But what news of the console legs race?
It's neck and neck.
Only the Virtual Boy qualified.
What a great closing quote:
Who won? AMD
AMD definitely won the console hardware race. The real arms race has always been to create an immersive experience and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
If they could only do something innovative and fun.
It could even earn lots of money, but I guess the 1% risk is just too much.
Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn't a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don't even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It's one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.
Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little 'arms race' about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.
In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5's no-games failure and the fact I haven't even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.
While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don't see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they've proven time and time again that they're hostile towards their fanbase (and I'm not talking about pirated games here).
I also don't see how the Switch brought a "fresh, intuitive control scheme" to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of "Pro" controllers.
And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we're at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most "revolutionary" title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn't much in there that truly surprised me.
YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn't something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.
I personally think indie games or games from "large-but-based" studios are more important than ever and that's where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.
Oh yeah, I wouldn't say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn't something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it's very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.
They've got like... what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that's exclusive to their hardware.
-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros
Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon
All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I'm convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.
Where Sony/MS have uhhh... Looks at the PS5 exclusive games... Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite...
While Fortnite, League and Genshin have quietly mopped the floor.
Nintendo suck though, their main console was so underpowered they couldnt run AAA games natively, their store is the biggest example of shovelware ever, like early days play store. Nintendo charge ridiculous money constantly for everything from peripherals and accessories to decade old ports. Speaking of ports they are overly reliant on them because their library is lacking. This is before we get into their build quality issues.
They are not a saviour, I appreciate they dont chase trends like AI and such but they will always fuck users when they can.
The console war ended and Sony didn't notice. They won, for whatever it's worth. But developers haven't targeted individual machines in a while.
This was blatant early in the PS3 / 360 divide. The 360 acted like a generic Windows / DirectX machine, even moreso than the literal Pentium 3 PC they shipped prior. The PS3 was a novel and tremendously powerful unicorn that nobody bothered with. At least, not until Sony helped devs treat it like any other compiler target.
Everything since then has been a blue AMD laptop versus a green AMD laptop. Nintendo dodged it for a bit, because Nintendo is a toy company that happens to be in the video game market, and their fixation on novelty avoids direct competition. But even they eventually tacked goofy controllers onto an Android tablet and printed money by being the only console you can play on a bus. All of the Switch games that aren't theirs exist because it's just another computer. Everything is... or it's doomed.
Microsoft's weird moves with Xbox reflect this. They saw it coming. It's arguably why they got into consoles, at all. They wanted to computerify that market so that they could push Windows on more people. That... kinda happened? But honestly it was coming even if they'd done nothing. RenderWare abstracted the graphics interface for Dreamcast, PS2, and PC, leading major engine-centric PC devs to release shooters on console, and allowing Rockstar to sell a zillion copies of assorted GTA games. The fight was already over, by the time EA ate RenderWare alive. Every publisher wanted to be on every platform to reach every customer.
Qualitative differences became an obstacle to that goal, and slowly disappeared.
But even they eventually tacked goofy controllers onto an Android tablet and printed money by being the only console you can play on a bus.
There was a bit of hope from Sony with the PSP and then the Vita, but they didn't seem to push it to the logical next step, like Nintendo did. Which was foolish, like the Vita had the PSTV version, and it was a bonehead move not to follow through with the trajectory they were already on.
Sony Sega'd themselves with the PSP.
The original was almost ingenious: the PS2's simple triangle-throwing GPU with an obscene fillrate, plus optical media for gigabytes of storage. Unfortunately they weren't clever enough to swap the laser assembly for like an LED and an optical-mouse sensor, so it was fragile and complicated and sucked power. More importantly - they made everyone buy their overpriced flash-media format, the Memory Stick.
Then they released another model that forced everyone to buy a different overpriced Memory Stick. Then they released an upgrade that forced everyone to buy yet another model of Memory Stick. Then they ditched the optical drive, fully screwing over customers who'd put up with all of that shit, and amassed some library of legitimate games.
The Vita was like the Dreamcast: being good didn't matter. Customers and developers alike simply were not interested. The trust was gone, and the ecosystem did not develop.
Sony's real fuckup was not embracing PS VR. Yeah, it was kind of a gimmick, but it was their gimmick. They stumbled into a massive share of a niche market for expensive gizmos. Sony, of all companies, should've leapt at that on instinct. Instead they let the VR revival dwindle, with early PC adopters burned by Oculus selling out to fucking Facebook, and the PS5 having no follow-up headset. It effortlessly could have been their thing. They had the money to gobble up second- and third-party studios, desperately seeking "exclusives." All of those could have had 3D TV support, for the giant virtual television you should obviously get from any non-VR PS5 game.
Anyway - they have PS5 VR headset now, but the momentum is gone. It doesn't even work with the VR games they already fucking had. Sony, of all companies, should know exactly what backwards compatibility is worth, as both a number and a narrative.
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