Comment by at1as | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at1as | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a very casual and very occasional gamer, so I can't deeply about this topic. But, is gaming in a dire state?

Platform exclusives seem to be rare (outside of Nintendo). I have an xbox (which I'm told is the wrong console), but I can play nearly everything a PS5 can. Most major titles seem to be very cross platform (PC, Xbox, PS5, and sometimes Nintendo). If anything, they stagger release dates, not access.

Steam's market share has held relatively steady at 75%. And in fairness, it does not seem like Epic is trying at all to improve their product, so I'm not sure they're deserving of more right now. GoG continues to have ts cult following (I had never heard of it until recently, but now see references to it frequently).

And it seems to be easier to game on Linux (and even Mac) than in the past few years.

I have no way of verifying this, but Perplexity states that ~5% of Steam games are exclusives. Have they exerted monopolistic pressure on the market in other ways?

The hardware itself used to be exclusive. We used to marvel at what the Cell processor, N64 MIPS, etc. could do, but now PS and XBox are just commodities that we could say is equivalent to a 58XX + 20XX. Even the Switch 1 became a commodity at the end of its life, if we count emulation.

Personally, I would define the lack of exclusives outside of Nintendo's shrinking sphere as a monoculture. At the same time, I don't have a verdict on whether this is good or not. On one hand, everyone on the globe can theoretically play anything now, as opposed to what countries some American and Japanese companies can find on a map, but on the other hand, this monoculture has also completely erased our ability to truly own or trade games. Gamers now need to periodically assess if they need to upgrade hardware, and it has directly connected this hobby with the turbulence of the global economy.

On an emotional level, the erosion of console boundaries has made the world feel smaller, and that makes me inexplicably sad. Imagine if your local playwrights or board game makers feel like they need to put their works on a global marketplace, tailored to the tastes of the biggest markets.

Of course, I too have a lot of blind spots. For example, I have no idea what games are brewing on Roblox or itch.io nowadays, some of which might be on a top 10 play-hours chart if we could aggregate all platforms together. When I see one of them like Juice World/Galaxy leak out of their containers, I'm filled with joy that there's still a pocket of this world that I haven't explored.

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