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Discussion (83 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The Switch with its detachable two controllers always knew this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.
The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.
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
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.
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.
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.
I have gaming machines from the 80s that still work and that I still love. They're not e-waste.
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
Just like every Android device or computer in your household? Are you trying to make a point for cloud computing?
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.
So is your pc hardware, unless you expect to stay on that 9800x3d and 4090 for the next 30 years...
To most people, a separate gaming appliance is seen as convenience, not waste.
Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.
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.)
> 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.
Console gaming is like 15% of all gaming world-wide, and GTA 6 is like a single-digit slice of that 15% slice.
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.
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 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.
It's all corporate and cloud from here.
“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?
You are going to remember why you have PS5 in about 120 days.
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.