I’m a millennial and the last consoles I’ve owned were the PS3 and Wii.
I’m a millennial, and the last pc I owned was around the left 4 dead 2 era. Consoles are doing ridiculously well right now, as is pc, everything is flourishing. anecdotal remarks don’t mean much.
Are they? The Switch is, but the Xbox is doing okay, and the PS5 quite well, nothing that great though.
Yes, yes, they are. The Xbox should be in the absolute gutter with microsofts decisions over the past decade. The fact that it exists at all is a testament to how strong consoles are these days.
The switch is doing great. The ps5 is doing great. The Xbox still exists even though the Xbox One happened, and this is all in the face of the pc platform doing great.
Do you own a PC?
Do you think you’re a gamer?
If the answer is No, and Yes. Then that’s interesting otherwise, it’s nothing new.
I had a Ps4, and A Xbox One. Now I game on PC. Honestly I’m sick of modern games so I mostly retro game, but a PC is a gaming “console” in that respect.
Smartphones were supposed to kill off portable consoles and for a brief moment they did. It took 2-3 years until people realized dedicated hardware was so much better and Switch happened to launch at perfect time.
Well, we’ve now got Steam Deck turning your portable console into a full PC, just connect a keyboard. Also no need to buy a Steam Deck version of that game you bought on Steam ten years ago, it’s already there and probably runs great.
It might be that proprietary, single purpose gaming portables are going to lose to more flexible portables even if smartphones are too limited to do the job.
long response sorry
I think smartphones could have done a massive amount of damage to consoles and ultimately will occupy a large section of gaming as they should.
This has been forgotten and it shouldn’t, but mobile gaming really wasn’t a business movement to transfer existing video game development practices to a mobile environment, it was a business movement to apply corporate business practices to gaming. Mobile gaming wasn’t ever given a fair chance because there has always been a huge headwind of money shaping the mobile gaming industry into the toxic shithole it is.
Not to mention the Apple and (more so) Google app stores have never valued creating reliable game suggestions and review databases that people actually trusted. Neither has either company given a shit about encouraging a cottage industry of mobile game critics, instead they have pretended like people are seriously going to keep looking for new games through the recommendations of an algorithm that is so obviously tuned to spit out crap and point you at the same old couple of popular slot machine microtransaction games over and over again.
If you forget all that nonsense though and take a look at games like Call Of Duty Mobile, Farlight 84 and Pubg Newstate, touchscreen interfaces are getting extremely good for shooters and many mobile players have gotten extremely good at creating custom arrangements of buttons so they can use three or four fingers to play almost competitively as the average mouse and keyboard player (farrrr better than a controller player without gyro).
Games like Call Of Duty Mobile and the now maddeningly defunct Apex Legends Mobile also allow the use of a controller hooked up via Bluetooth to your phone. Using an xbox x/s controller and the PowerA Moga gaming clip 2 you can mount your phone on your controller in a very sturdy fashion. You can then turn gyro input on your phone on too (which is normally for touchscreen users directly holding their phone). In this way I was able to aim in Apex Legends Mobile without auto-aim far more competitively than someone playing normal Apex Legends on console could do with a controller and no gyro even if they had auto-aim turned on.
This clip only costs about $17, so that with a used Xbox x/s controller for let’s say $35 gets you the ability to comfortably play Wreckfest on your phone anywhere in your house with your phones beautiful AMOLED screen at a close enough distance to give you a high fidelity viewing experience. The clip also easily pops off and can be stored in a pocket.
You can’t argue the potential of mobile gaming especially if people continue to buy phones with fairly powerful processors and high quality screens. Sure I love gaming on a computer or a console, but those cost money and most people only need to drop <$50 on some peripherals to game with their phone. I game on a steamdeck and I am satisfied with that right now but in many ways the balance of my phone in a moga clip was better and anyways everybody already has a phone so it was dead easy to wrangle friends in on actually good mobile games.
The problem is all the business/corporate bros in mobile gaming are keeping the industry from innovating or really even just replicating the experience of normal gaming because they have been hellbent on enshittifying mobile gaming from the start.
We would ALL own Diablo Mobile if it was actually a phenomenal Diablo game that we could play with any friends we wanted and was satisfying to control on mobile. Blizzard just catastrophically shit the bed and made people feel icky for participating in this corporatization of gaming.
Made a comment in another thread the other day, but as a gamesir x2 pro owner the telescopic controllers are really good now too.
I got the USBC one so no input delay or battery to recharge, cost me $100AUD, built solid and there are mod guides out there now (I’m gonna add a 30mm fan or two to keep my phone cool it can get a bit hot under heavy load.
Isn’t it amazing this capability was basically right there from the beginning of mobile gaming?
It really shows badly corporate business practices utterly destroyed the ability of mobile gaming to innovate and improve as a medium for years and years. We might as well be almost 10 years behind where we should be in the evolution of the mobile gaming scene and it is honestly appalling.
I am so glad we have options like your gamesir x2! I use an Xbox controller just because I already had one, actually for awhile I was using a wired Xbox 360 controller which would sometimes work for games that weren’t even designed with controller input because compatibility is so good with 360 controllers lol.
How do you like the joysticks and buttons on the gamesir?
It’s just not the same market, might as well say that smartphones are killing tabletop gaming. DS lifetime sales were 155m, Switch is at something like 140m and still going. There’s not that much room for growth probably but smartphone gaming is saturated as well.
The comment about killing a market came from you; phones are, as I said, the most popular device for gaming. Likening video gaming to tabletop gaming is silly and irrelevant; phones can and do play the same games which consoles do, board games are not the same market or sphere.
Billions use their phones for games, the Switch accounts for over a hundred million consoles, which are essentially large phones/tablets with controllers. It depends what you mean about dedicated hardware, as there are phones which are more powerful. If it’s based on the controllers, sure, although there are also pads which can connect to mobile devices to make them into little consoles in themselves.
I’m not sure what you mean by smartphone gaming saturation; in terms of how many phones have been sold and who has them? I guess. But the market for mobile games is absolutely huge because of how many exist, so you have a potential market of billions rather than millions.
Yes, DS sales were, and now it’s dead. The Switch is Nintendo’s only console yet has not picked up the slack. It should be doing Wii + DS numbers, not under the latter.
Can’t afford a house, but a gaming PC is only $800-2000. 🤷🏻♂️
You can build your own house in Minecraft! Or own your own home in the Sims!
Hey that’s not a bad idea actually… I could live in a hole in the ground IRL, just like my first night in Minecraft!
There’s always living with your parents and saving up money if you can
If you don’t have that option avalible but have a way of getting money then you could look into bicycle campers or vanlife
But honestly fuck the exploitative capitalist system that causes homelessness in the first place
Did they realize consoles were nothing more than cheap PCs? That PC gaming gives more flexibility and freedom than a walled garden?
I haven’t owned a console in years and don’t care to own one.
Do you realize the difference is that a console will generally give a known quality and they usually just work without tweaking and tinkering? You don’t have to research compatibility, drivers, USB versions, or any of a hundred other tiny things.
I have a gaming PC, steam deck, and a couple of mini PCs so that I can stream games across the house and play what I want in any room. It’s much more plug and play than it used to be, which is why I don’t feel the need to get a console. But not everyone wants to do more than plug in, update, and play.
Do you realize the difference is that a console will generally give a known quality and they usually just work without tweaking and tinkering?
The problem with this argument is that it only applies to PCs that you buy and build from off the shelf parts like any other computer you get where everything can be different. It does not apply to a pre-built console type PC manufactured using a custom IC pre-configured operating system dedicated to run games in a console-like experience, where every single one of those models are the same, especially in a case like the steam deck where it’s made by the same manufacturer.
But not everyone wants to do more than plug in, update, and play.
Pretty sure you don’t need to if all you want to do is play games, a good majority of games work out of the box already. Maybe it wasn’t the case in the beginning when proton was younger (which is where this mentality comes from) but it certainly does now.
Edit: Hmm Downvote with no response, that plus your username tells me all I need to know. Have fun.
This guy seems to be full of takes that sound like theyre really, really bad. Only time will truly tell, but I feel pretty confident in saying that whatever this guy says is probably mostly incorrect.
Well, he was an exec at SEGA before the Dreamcast was killed, so I mean… Maybe youre onto something…
SEGA was floundering as early as the SEGA CD and the Saturn was a failure. Everything considered the Dreamcast did OK.
While that may be technically true the overlap between phone games and console/PC games is no minute as to make them effectively two seperate markets. At its best phone gaming conists of people running DOS box on their phone and playing DOOM with a bluetooth mouse, at its worst phone gaming is a bunch of shovel ware gache trash appealing to the lowest common denominator.
The reason why phone gaming will never take over the computer/console market is because it is just absolutely filled with shit, also phone are just too underpowered and clunky when it comes to controls.
At its best phone gaming conists of people running DOS box on their phone and playing DOOM with a bunch bluetooth mouse, at its worst phone gaming is a bunch of shovel ware gache trash appealing to the lowest common denominator.
To put it bluntly, your whole comment shows you have zero clue about the mobile gaming market, how big it is, the overlap, and what people are actually playing.
The reason why phone gaming will never take over the computer/console market is because it is just absolutely filled with shit, also phone are just too underpowered and clunky when it comes to controls.
Absolutely not. There are a lot of naff games, as there are on consoles, but a shitload of games which have brought out hugely competitive scenes. The mobile gaming market has already taken over the handheld scene; yes, the Switch is popular, however people game on phones in far bigger numbers. League of Legends on Android alone has over 50m downloads (not sure the exact number), plus Apple downloads and it’s more than any Switch game. There are multiple games with these numbers, and far from clunky.
“Underpowered” is a joke; we’ve had powerful gaming phones for a fair few years now, many are more powerful than a Switch yet they aren’t good enough in your eyes? My phone (not a gaming one, just a Pixel) plays Dreamcast games better than my Dreamcast did, and whatever else I’ve thrown at it.