Who has hurt the console business worse this generation?

Technology is always changing and evolving. Xbox going to a software based solution isn't them hurting consoles, it's just the nature of where things were headed. I think what hurts consoles far more is their price. Even last gen, you could buy a ps4 or xbox one for $150 after about 3 years. This gen consoles are still full price, 4 years post launch and ps5 pro is selling for $700 lol. I don't need to mention the milking that is Nintendo, selling ancient tech for what they're selling it for.

"Who has hurt the console business worse this generation?"

Answer: The actual game developers who are targeting certain groups of gamers. I'm not gonna go into deep details as I'm pretty damn sure most will know what I'm talking about. MS, Nintendo, and Sony are ok IMO.

It doesn't matter. What matters is PC just keeps getting better.

Neither poll option. The ones that have hurt the console business the most and will continue is the gamers themselves. We have way to many cry babies that cry about new game releases and review bomb games for pathetic reasons,. This actually hurts the industry and deters developers and game companies to not take chances and to not want to release future big budget games.

Microsoft for me. Releasing a console like the Series S and the Series X and then making devs have feature parity with the two has made some games come in after other platforms or they never come at all. Not trying to compete with Sony on third party deals means they keep losing out on securing content for their player base. After putting their games day one on gamepass, players have seen their games take hits in terms of quality and have conditioned players to expect games to be on a subscription instead of buying the game.

Sony's not perfect and they are taking advantage of inflation and lack of competition from MS to charge more for their goods and services, but they're not trying to fundamentally change the industry because they're having a hard time staying relevant in the industry.

Nintendo is being Nintendo and has been doing what game companies should be. Putting out games for people to play.

It’s the new generation of gamers, of course. Many kids today don’t even know what a real console was like. Today’s consoles are basically PCs and many people play on smart phones and tablets. Technology has changed, now you can have 100 games on a harddrive, you can download games in a matter of minutes. Disc drives have been extinct from PCs for many years now. You’re literally just seeing it on consoles for the last time. Times change. It’s pretty silly to point the finger at one company. They’re all just reacting to the market.

I would say Ms but it doesn’t concern me since I mostly game on pc now

Don't take SW as a barometer, it's made up of enthusiasts. Consoles are targeting the mainstream, you'd have to poll them and look at what they want. Also why isn't Valve an option? They're the ones driving the alternative to consoles.

@TheEroica: It's a combo of all of them.

Nintendo has mixed Console and Handheld into one, which is nice BUT it really limits the devices power compared to the competition and PC. So it doesn't get a lot of other games which makes it less competitive in the console space.....and Nintendo once again seems to have the Nintendo Drought going on.

Sony is definitely the console market leader and it's going to their head with anti consumer practices and prices increases on everything.

MS is once again trying to buy and bully their way into an industry, making it more consolidated with less competition (yes more independent gaming companies is a good thing, it's competition), they can't seem to make a good MS studio game AT ALL, and to top it all off they don't even seem to want to make consoles anymore and are leaning towards multiplat and software options.

and dude no. Not everyone is going to start building PC rigs or buying them. I don't want to game on a windows platform, sorry no thank you. I've done it, and It's not for me. I want the game to work damn near 100% of the time, and I'm sorry Windows prevents that from happening. I don't want work arounds or custom software to make stuff work. I want a big TV, surround sound, a controller, and the game to fire up and work with all that.

No its not 😂🤣

I think it's the gamers themselves. Back in the '90s, developers were willing to take more risks because development didn't cost them tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. And look where we're at now; everything is an open world game or a remake and everything has micro-transactions. The reason that video game developers are happy to try to rape us with micro-transactions is because gamers are buying them. If they didn't sell well, they would've disappeared by now.

I don't think that just one of the three console manufacturers are ruining the industry. All three are guilty of seeming like a bunch of money hungry dirt bags.

I didn't say geniuses

My answer may shock you.

Nintendo

Nintendo has shown the industry a different way that works. They showed the industry that power and performance are less important than flexibility and portability. Nintendo showed the industry that spending less on game development doesn’t impact the market appeal of the software. Nintendo showed the competition that taking losses on hardware isn’t a necessary evil. It’s not even necessary. Nintendo got PC companies into the hardware making business. Nintendo has shaken up the industry far more than the other two.

It’s easy to call PlayStation a “monopoly” or Xbox a “failure.” But it’s Nintendo that has driven the industry into its current direction.

Sony. They’re making it too damn expensive.

I have a tough time calling folks that don’t actually spend any money on their hobby “enthusiasts.”

Walk up to a middle aged mom at your local department store. A women that has kids in the 6-12 year old range. That woman has spent more on video games than most people here. Go to a local sporting event. Ask any guy there if they play video games. Whoever says “yes” to that question spends more on video games than the average person here. Ask any small child if they play Roblox. If they say yes, their parents have spent 3X more money on video games than the average SW poster. Those are the people driving the industry. Not the penny pitching cultists that tie their identity to one of the two companies that sells a video game toy powered by AMD.

Microsoft and Xbox! **** the Xbox. Glad that shit is on life support. Deservedly so. Pushing renting games bite them in the ass.

So your dollar investment is a direct 1:1 on your definition of enthusiast?

It‘a not a definitive definition, no. But go to any enthusiast board or Reddit thread and find a group as allergic to spending money as folks are here. You won’t find one.

There are some enthusiasts here, sure. But as a collective this place is far more casual than it is enthusiast.

@TheEroica: Yeah for sure. Would definitely not be listing soccer moms, people who pump money into sports games’ micro transactions, Roblox kids, Fortnite players, mobile game players, etc., etc., as some sort of example for gamer enthusiast. Pretty damn far from it actually. 😅

@ghostofgolden: 🤣

There’s folks here that can’t use a screw driver to change a ssd or *gasp* build a PC that wanna call themselves enthusiasts. Sorry, I’m not doing that.

At least the soccer moms contribute to the developers by purchasing games. And those Fortnite kids are FAR better at that game than most “enthusiasts” here will ever be at theirs.

@ghostofgolden: Hey you’re the one who just brought up a bunch of examples of people spending money as gamer enthusiasts. 🤷‍♂️

Kids being good at Fortnite is suppose to be another example of a gamer enthusiast? I mean if that’s all they do is play it constantly then yeah I would be surprised if they didn’t become good at it. 😅

Regardless that seems another very poor bar to put up there as an example of a gamer enthusiast.

I'm not gonna try and over define the word enthusiast, but it sure feels like there's a lot more to it than that... To me, someone who loves something, keeps up with news, takes part in, and generally enjoys the finer details can be an enthusiest... I have more respect for someone using their resources to spend a couple hundred on a hunt for the great games throughout history than someone throwing a thousand dollars at new releases and fortnite skins...

I just think we can't tie that word "enthusiast" to how much cash you're dumping into the hobby.

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant. I don't think any one company or group is to blame really.

There are just certain realities kicking in now. In terms of the number of people using consoles, it hasn't expanded much since the PS1 days. Generally the top selling console is around 120 million over 5-6 years and the other 2 are follow ups, with a lot of overlap (i.e. people having more than 1 console). But the costs have grown. I thought GTA 6 would cost 250 million to make (which is a far chunk of change). Then i found out that Spiderman 2 cost around that. If that's the case then GTA 6 could very well be close to 1billion in production cost. There is only 1 IP that can sustain those production costs. It's....er...well it's GTA.

So something had to give on the exclusive front. It's just too risky to make games costing 200 million bucks then leaving them on one console, even a relatively successful console like the PS5. It's been coming for a while but, this time, I think the train finally left the rails for MS and Sony. Despite this, insanely, they both still seem to be putting coal in the furnace. MS are boasting that their next console is going to be the biggest generation leap in tech. Sony are releasing the PS5 Pro...for what!? It's just more cost and bother on the development front.

The costs are also just killing innovation in the AAA space. The most technically interesting game is a 10 year old, laughably mismanaged project still in Alpha. Even last gen, on potato CPUs, we got something interesting like No mans sky. This gen, big CPU upgrade....SFA of technical interest on the simulation side. Instead we have games running PS3/360 levels of simulation (or appear to be from the users perspective) running poorly and people are scratching their heads as to why. If the big AAA blockbusters are not landing then that really hurts consoles.

I also think, in the pursuit of things like BC, we have lost some of the benefits of what a console can do. BC is not a 0 cost thing. There is a hardware cost. AMD have discussed some of the limitations they were under when working on RDNA. BC with GCN was a requirement. It needed to be able to work with GCN workloads so PS4/X1 games could run with less hassle on on the PS5/XSX. That's not free. The controller also needs to offer the same functionality as it's predecessor. So, with a new gen, consoles are no longer just a blank sheet of paper. I mean we, by and large, know what the next Xbox and the next PS are going to be. It'll be the same deal as the last few times. Same concept, more umph. It's getting boring. There are now rumours that the Switch 2 is going to be just a Switch 2.0.....which I hope proves false. A new console is an opportunity to try new things. The console holders have a very strong capacity to put requirements on new games to get certified and this can be used to push innovation. I'm not saying BC should be abandoned of course...but it shouldn't be top priority, not if it gets in the way of trying something new.

At the end of the day I think the consoles biggest problem is it's still "Many of the downsides of PC gaming, few of the upsides". lots of patches, Lots of buggy games at launch, Lots of OS updates (now recommended for parents to unpack and update the console before the big day) and now console games even have PC like settings. It's ridiculous. The xbox in particular is bad at this newness. You go from an Xbox one to an Xbox series. You unpack the new box (it's very nicely packaged to MSs credit), you plug it in, turn it on. Update the system inevitably, put in your account (remember that password?) then....it's the same UI. The same sounds. On the same controller. To all intents and purposes it's the same bloody system as the 10 year old one. It's like getting a new PC just to be greeted by the same version of Windows.....AGAIN!!

There is little new. There is little in the way of unknown possibilities in the console space. It just feels very tired.

100% Sony.🤷🏽‍♂️

Sony; they're actively removing games from market, and transitioning to an inherently anti-consumer GaaS model for future titles.

I don't like consoles in general because I think they sort of create this walled garden for you, and PC is just so much better as an alternative; but out of the big three, I think Sony is doing the most harm.

Nintendo a close second for just being Nintendo.

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*edit: I agree with @osan0 in that the industry as a whole, at least as far as AAA goes, has really just sort of become stagnant and shown little effort to innovate. I am sure there are valid reasons for this, but as a consumer I am constantly baffled by a lot of the business decisions they make.

On one hand, I know I don't represent the average consumer of video games because I am an enthusiast or a hobbyist (that is, someone that games a lot); but on the other hand, I think AAA publishers are fairly out of touch with gaming as a whole.

I hope we see them return to form where we get more games, more new IP's, and less regurgitation of the "same ol' same ol'" of CoD, AC, etc. etc..

I'm generally not nostalgic but I'd say prior to the 2010's we saw more risk-taking from publishers and iirc we saw a lot of growth in the video game industry as a result. Now that there are some titans of publishign at the top, we seem to be steering towards just a lot of the same crap and little risk-taking.

None of this applies to smaller studios, independent gaming, etc. this is exclusively (or almost exclusively) a AAA problem.

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Yeah I really just can't pick anyone else. Objectively speaking it's Sony. Even if I were a fan of Sony, I'd still pick Sony.

And it sucks because I'd like them to do better. A rising tide lifts all ships, as they say.

Sony literally kills me, they have like WHAT a few exclusives??? Nintendo has a boat load.

Xbox has a lot of awesome features, like backwards compatibility with three generations of games and Play Anywhere.

How things change!

It used to be that PC was dead, that AAA games would not come to PC or would come very late.

Now we are dominating.

Poor cows can't catch a break

Sony with their 30 dollar stand and 80 dollar disc drive

PlayStation for me. No games. Price increases. Going 3rd party. Layoffs and studio closures. Focus on GaaS. They are destroying the console business.

Nvidia did......pffff...."ray tracing" - what a joke.

Now that all the retards think they need to have ray tracing to be viable and then since they can't actually run a game that has full ray tracing without generating fake frames and upscaling....if your console cannot do all of these things it's a failure.

Then again, most gaming computers can't do these things either.

Bingo... Being able to purchase something doesn't equate to someone's interest in a hobby or activity etc. Enthusiasm comes in many forms... Shit, I used to draw pictures of early Nintendo game characters and eat Nintendo breakfast cereal and read egm and gamepri and Nintendo power... Are we saying my mom and dad were the actual gamers this whole time? Lol

All three have been terrible, but I'll go with MS, SONY, and Nin in that order.

If I had to lean on one more than the others, it would be Microsoft. They seem totally stagnated. Worse, they've bought up a bunch of studios and dragged them into it, with layoffs ensuing. It's so badly managed. My Series X hasn't been used for much outside of playing older software.

I haven't owned a Playstation product since the PS2, so I don't have an opinion on Sony other than they can't seem to read the market right now. Nintendo is probably the least guilty since they've been off in their own corner doing their thing. The Switch has been an exceptional success for them with tons of great games old and new.

@TheEroica: Or the kid playing Fortnite 24/7 who can 360 no scope across the map. Pumping in hundreds of dollars for skins, season passes, loot boxes, etc. That’s a real gamer enthusiast I tell you! 😅

@Archangel3371: you just described the exact gamer that all these money grubbing corporations want to make games for.... Barf.

You are describing casual, weak minded, uninformed, easily exploitable individuals that follow trends, give in to FOMO and don't think for themselves and don't ask questions. Spending a lot does not make someone an enthusiast. Especially when they are bad spending habits.

True enthusiasts are knowledgeable, well informed, and passionate about the hobby. They spend the time playing a lot of different games and dissecting their mechanics and evaluating the different elements of games. They take the time to learn how games are made, learn about the technology that powers them. They make informed purchases and don't just buy what is being marketed to them. They read reviews, watch gameplay, and learn about the games and tech before buying them. They are more willing to buy an unknown indie game that is offering something new or different. They keep up with gaming news and typically know more about games and technology than the people selling them.

Enthusiasts know better than to waste money on predatory practices or fall for gimmicks. They know not to support and encourage broken games. They wait for patches and optimization fixes. They tailor the experience to their needs and desires. Whether that is changing settings, modding games, playing with a specific peripheral, etc.... they are not looking for the basic bitch experience. They care about quality and are selective with their purchases. They don't mind spending money on games and hardware that deliver quality, but they don't like supporting bad industry practices.

MS still got no GOTY contenders. They might not be in this years TGA again 😄

Indiscriminate spending of money makes on an enthusiasts....😂

1 - That description doesn’t match the majority of the board here. Folks don’t know how games are made. They don’t understand the hardware. You say they dissect mechanics, but how many here could hold their own in an online fighting game? A shooter? A sports title? Most people here play single player games. An enthusiast to me has to have experience with a broad range of the hobby. How can a gaming enthusiast never experience VR? Never use a DualSense controller? Not see a Series X and Series S running the same games? Never build a PC? Never mod a game? Never use a fight stick? Never play Nintendo games? You can be into video games. You can call it your hobby. But to be an “enthusiast” requires more imo

2 - But the industry moves where the money goes. Which is why the “enthusiasts“ here feel like the industry is leaving them behind. Don’t buy broken games seems like a simple concept. But what you view as “predatory” may not be a negative to others. And what is more ”basic bitch? A person playing Elden Ring on a Series S, or a person playing COD on PC at 360fps with a $300 keyboard and $80 mouse? The bargain hunting console gamer puts “value”’over their experience. That’s not an enthusiast theme. I guess what you call an enthusiast I would call a hobbyist

Here is an interesting clip about Sony's shady practices. If true, it makes a lot of sense as to why many consider Sony the worst.

Are we allowed to link reddit? I never see it used on here. Ah well here it is.

Link

The fun thing about opinions is that it don't define the meaning of words.

Enthusiast:a person who is very interested in a particular activity or subject.

So, your opinion doesn't matter when it comes to what an enthusiast is.

They wanted to get that PC gamers invested in their ecosystem but it backfired.

@ghostofgolden: Enthusiasts will at least take the time to learn about a game/tech before forming an opinion on it. However, I don't blame people for avoiding things if they know it is not for them based on past experiences. If someone dedicates much more time to single player games, I don't blame them. Most multiplayer games are trash these days. They represent the worst industry practices and have lost their way.

I would frown more upon the person playing Elden Ring on a Series S than the person playing COD on the nice setup. Even though the person has taken to a more casual game in COD, they at least care about making the most of their experience with that game. The Elden Ring player has compromised their experience way too much on the Series Shit and is getting the basic bitch experience.

Yup.

The thing is, you have to wonder if Helldivers 2 would be more active if people in all those other countries were allowed to buy it still.

I don't want to generalize, but we in the West have more disposable income, while folks in other countries are not so lucky; I'd argue that while we might jump from game to game in the US and Canada and such when bored, folks in poorer countries might stick with it in a sort of stabilizing effect. This in turn would keep player count higher, which in turn might actually keep folks in more prosperous countries playing as well (since no one wants to play a "dead game").

Just a thought.

I would really like to see what would happen if the game were made free, and put back on the market in ALL countries. It'd probably be incredibly popular and would increase sales of their skins and stuff.

Cant help thinking if ms was more competitive Sony wouldn't have released the pro at £700.

Why do you cows always blame MS for Sony's current shitshow?

You guys are just incapable of holding Sony accountable for ANYTHING.

Sony doesn't need "competition" to do right by you cows, the more games they make the more consoles they sell and more copies of games they sell, the more they bring people into their ecosystem, the more competition they get the less sale they get.