Steamdeck has shown that the age of the general purpose computer is very popular.
I think most people don’t care how their games run, just that they run.
Consoles were a way to have games “work” out of the box, even if you didn’t have a high powered computer. Now everyone has a high powered computer (phone).
Nintendo will never die, but I think open platforms like stramdeck with their HUGE libraries will be more popular until even cell phones take over that space.
I think most people don’t care how their games run, just that they run.
Honestly, this is why I game almost exclusively on console. I can download a game, press play, and it just works.
I have a Steam Deck too but I find myself not using it a lot. I loved it when I got it, but anymore it seems like there are just too many quirks(?) to make it an enjoyable experience. I swear even some verified games I have to do this tweak or that tweak to make it run right.
I’m married with kids and a house and 4 cars to maintain and when I get time to game I just want to play. I don’t want to think about if there is something special I need to do or some driver I need to update or whatever.
Yeah as a PC gamer of several decades I feel like this is easily the biggest weakness of the platform.
The Steam Deck did a pretty good job of trying to make things easy but it sounds like it still has a ways to go. Hopefully things get better and we can all get a “best of both worlds” experience at least when it comes to handhelds.
Consoles aren’t going anywhere so long as GPU manufacturers keep scalping their userbase. A console costs less than just a GPU these days, with mostly comparable performance.
Mid-range GPUs still exist, they just dont get the same coverage as the top-end cards. An RTX 4060 is set at $300 which is much cheaper than a PS5 or Series X
$300 for the GPU only. You still need the rest of the PC to play games. The CPU will be at least $150 for anything that will run newer games basically at all, and then your RAM will be at least another $50. Now add on the case, fans, cooler, and any other accessories and for a mid-to-low range PC you’ve already passed the price of a premium console.
I’ve been a PC gamer for 3 decades. Most budget conscious PC gamers I know upgrade individual components as needed. Done this way, you can easily get more for your money than having to buy a new console every cycle.
A Ryzen 5600 is less than that and already beats the CPU in the PS5/X1X, especially in gaming.
The “mid-to-low range PC” already beats both consoles and when you consider that games are generally cheaper on PC and you don’t have to subscribe to a service just to play online, you’re quickly arriving at a point where PC gaming is cheaper while offering superior performance.
This is an interesting take. Historically, the main benefits to console gaming were 2 things:
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Consoles are cheaper than PCs
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Games require no config and and are guaranteed to be compatible
Nether of these is really the case anymore. For the price of a PS5 or a Series X you could get a midrange gaming PC with similar performance.
Regarding complexity, we kind of met in the middle. Long gone are the days when you could just pop a disc in the tray of your playstation or xbox and start playing, every game requires an install now. And on the PC side, you very rarely need to configure settings to get a game to a playable state. Hell, you dont really even need to manually install drivers anymore.
Of course, as the article points out, none of this applies to Nintendo and those consoles are still worth buying.
My guess for the future is that if Microsoft and Sony are going to hang around in the hardware space, they’re going to make something akin to the steam deck, but locked to their own storefront. And then they’ll wonder why people are still choosing PCs over their hardware.
First point is more true today than it was in the past. It is impossible to build a gaming pc for $400-500 that is capable of playing most modern games at high settings (without RT) and play at 60 fps. The gpu capable of doing that is around $300 by itself.
I think the longevity of consoles also plays a large part in their appeal. Knowing you can use the system to play at consistent performance levels for 7-8 years is a comforting thought.
For the PC side, I’m not sure about your point about drivers. Nvidia/AMD/Intel regularly release day 1 drivers to improve compatibility with new games.
A Radeon RX 6650 XT is like $230 and performs on par or better than the PS5’s GPU. Pair that with a Zen-3-or-newer CPU like the Ryzen 5600 for < $130 that already outperforms the aging Zen 2 CPU in the PS5 and then you’ll have to add 16 GB of RAM which can be had for < $40, a cheap mainboard (you probably don’t care much about the feature set coming from a console anyway), PSU, SSD and case and you’re probably at around $550 to $600.
Save $10 on pretty much every full price AAA title, benefit from more frequent and more aggressive sales, enjoy not having to pay $60 per year and you’ll quickly arrive at a point where you actually paid less for PC gaming while having an experience that’s at least on par if not superior in terms of graphical fidelity and performance.
It’s a myth that PC hardware doesn’t last as long as console hardware, especially nowadays. I know people who are playing current games with a GPU years older than a PS5 just fine. And when you start with hardware equal to or newer/superior to a console, you’ll be able to run all games for that generation just fine.
Oh and don’t start with the magic word “optimization”. Optimization mostly involves improving code paths and removing complexity from scenes where it won’t be noticed. These optimizations seamlessly transfer over to all ports including PC.
$666 without kb/mouse/monitor/os. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/vjVNbL
You’re right in that over the long term, a PC gamer will probably end up spending less on their hobby. But for someone starting from scratch and trying to decide on a path, the console remains the cheaper and easier platform to jump into.
I don’t see where I mentioned optimization but I am curious and maybe you can elaborate further on what I’m guessing are probably the differences between game patch optimizations vs driver level optimizations?
I think the “no config” part is missed on most lemmy users. I have buddies who can barely work their phone. They have consoles. They would be screwed trying to do pc gaming, it’s just too much. Drivers. Filesystems and paths. Cloud shit this, updates that. They just want to play.
He’ll, I know how to do everything and the notion of optimization turns me off. Being in your 40s and gaming is precious time where you don’t want to mess around with anything but your entertainment objective. Yeah consoles have some of those things but it’s more idiot proof and straightforward.
Not sure I agree the premise of the article. Sales are going to be down when there are fewer AAA releases to drive hardware sales. It’s taking longer and longer to develop those games and the budget required no longer justifies console exclusivity.
I think 2025 will be the real measure of console strength when the big releases are scheduled to come out.
Outside of handhelds, I don’t really see the use-case of consoles anymore, to be honest.