Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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I think the market has plenty of choice between Playstation, Switch, Xbox and PC. Xbox and Playstation are even basically the same consoles in a different box and with a chip sprinkled onto the motherboard here and there; it's not like the olden days of special PS2/PS3 chips that all need to be handled manually.

The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.

On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.

I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.

You are right about the hardware side of the Xbox and Playstation. Their differences are minimal at best.

However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to.

On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up.

For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too.

That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people.

My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either.

Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.

> but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement.

For starters, I can respond to this line: I haven't gamed on a Microsoft product since I switched to Valve's Proton. That's a good thing, and Valve putting that leverage there really opens the door for other manufacturers. Better yet, it kicks both Microsoft and Sony in the pants and asks them to come up with a better reason to exist than "API exclusivity". That's badass, in my book.

As for Sony, I don't think it's hard to see that they're struggling here. The end of the PS4's lifecycle was a bit of a mess, and resulted in Sony changing their attitude for a lot of things like crossplay and publishing to PC. The featureset for the PS5 is almost comically gimmecky, the games cost too much, and without backwards-compatibility the game library would be almost empty. It distinctly feels like Sony's strategy of using exclusives to bolster cross-platform releases isn't working anymore.

My point here isn't to bash Sony, but to highlight that they have professional agency and have repeatedly made poor choices in software and hardware. It's fine if you want to zoom-in on the decidedly small arena of "Sony vs Microsoft", but it's hard to look at their fight and say that it's not Sony's fault.

everything here is true but the “gimmicky” bit. The controller is the most exciting thing to happen to games (outside of the actual games) since the Wii

The old Steam Box program tried to solve many of the problems with PC gaming you describe. Common performance targets with prebuilt boxes that just work. You don't buy a computer, you buy a Box.

I do think the Switch is a competitor to the bigger players, though, but only for certain games. There's a huge market out there that just wants to play some fun, casual games, and doesn't care about the latest Call of Duty. This market is the reason the mobile gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions and why Nintendo remains a success. The Switch placates the needs for many people that would've otherwise bought an Xbox or Playstation: it's better suited for gaming than a mobile phone and less expensive and "gamer" than the alternatives. It being handheld also puts it in a unique position that Microsoft and Sony are trying to compete against with their mobile game streaming services.

To me, Animal Crossing and Pokemon are not that dissimilar to Final Fantasy and Call of Duty. These games could be ported to the higher spec'd competitors but they remain exclusive. It's interesting how "I've got a Switch and an Xbox" has become relatively normal but "I've got an Xbox and a Playstation" hasn't. Nintendo has done really well convincing its customers that their funky tablet somehow lives in a category of its own.

I agree with most of this, except that I'm even more bullish on the Steam Deck. My wife has never been much of a gamer, but bought a Steam Deck. Now she can play her cozy games in a way she never could before. It's not great for AAA gaming but its accessible in ways that only Nintendo's consoles have been in the past.

I've had the same experience, despite my GTX 1080 I'm mostly gaming on my Deck these days. Everything just works, the form factor is nice, and the games are affordable.

I've also seriously considered setting my PC up for a SteamOS dual boot, but sadly Nvidia being Nvidia makes that difficult to do.

There are some glitches here and there, but SteamOS could easily be mistaken for a console system rather than a Linux distro.

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