I mean, nowadays consoles are just a PC with glasses and a moustache… It’d be great if we moved away from physical consoles and more towards digital platforms so that the gaming industry is less fragmented.
Basically officially supported and updated roms/emulators. Or just skip that and make Nintendo and such something akin to Steam.
You’ll pry my physical devices from my cold dead hands.
I wouldnt buy a “digital only” platform service if they started paying me for it. No way in hell am I giving up what little control I still have over my physical console.
It’s funny to talk about “keeping control” because you can put a disk in a device that completely locks down every aspect of the game environment. PC offers generally way more control over games, allows more games, etc.
And there’s GOG to buy from if one doesn’t want Steam’s potential ability to delicense a purchase, but I’d be playing games through Steam either way because of it’s ability to tweak and rebuild controller handling for each game. I’m picky and a lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers, so having that extra control over the experience is a major plus to me.
Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.
“A lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers” - making a game work for keyboards and controllers, and even more so allowing keys to be rebound, isn’t super straightforward. I make games in my spare time, so I encounter this all the time.
I hope we get another time where you can build a PC that matches or surpasses the latest consoles, at a lower cost. It’s been a while.
When has that ever been the case?
The age-old tradeoff has always been that consoles are restrictive and un-upgradable, but generally cheaper than building a PC due to fixed parts costs and loss-leader strategies.
When consoles went online that was pretty much it for me. They had been cheaper and easier casual gaming thing but that kinda disapeared. The switch had something since you got the gaming on the go thing but the steamdeck is the thing for me now and I doubt I will go back as it is the only thing to bring me back to something like a console.
After getting a Steam Deck my Switch is just collecting dust and that even though I would still like to play on it since it’s a lot lighter and more portable. Unfortunately it’s just a horrible deal to buy games locked to one platform at a higher price than their PC counterpart without getting any of the benefits (modding, free cloud saves across devices).
I’m only willing to buy the switch version if I really want to support the developers e.g. Celeste or Stardew Valley.
