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Former PlayStation exec says console arms race has plateaued
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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The console war ended and Sony didn't notice. They won, for whatever it's worth. But developers haven't targeted individual machines in a while.
This was blatant early in the PS3 / 360 divide. The 360 acted like a generic Windows / DirectX machine, even moreso than the literal Pentium 3 PC they shipped prior. The PS3 was a novel and tremendously powerful unicorn that nobody bothered with. At least, not until Sony helped devs treat it like any other compiler target.
Everything since then has been a blue AMD laptop versus a green AMD laptop. Nintendo dodged it for a bit, because Nintendo is a toy company that happens to be in the video game market, and their fixation on novelty avoids direct competition. But even they eventually tacked goofy controllers onto an Android tablet and printed money by being the only console you can play on a bus. All of the Switch games that aren't theirs exist because it's just another computer. Everything is... or it's doomed.
Microsoft's weird moves with Xbox reflect this. They saw it coming. It's arguably why they got into consoles, at all. They wanted to computerify that market so that they could push Windows on more people. That... kinda happened? But honestly it was coming even if they'd done nothing. RenderWare abstracted the graphics interface for Dreamcast, PS2, and PC, leading major engine-centric PC devs to release shooters on console, and allowing Rockstar to sell a zillion copies of assorted GTA games. The fight was already over, by the time EA ate RenderWare alive. Every publisher wanted to be on every platform to reach every customer.
Qualitative differences became an obstacle to that goal, and slowly disappeared.
There was a bit of hope from Sony with the PSP and then the Vita, but they didn't seem to push it to the logical next step, like Nintendo did. Which was foolish, like the Vita had the PSTV version, and it was a bonehead move not to follow through with the trajectory they were already on.
Sony Sega'd themselves with the PSP.
The original was almost ingenious: the PS2's simple triangle-throwing GPU with an obscene fillrate, plus optical media for gigabytes of storage. Unfortunately they weren't clever enough to swap the laser assembly for like an LED and an optical-mouse sensor, so it was fragile and complicated and sucked power. More importantly - they made everyone buy their overpriced flash-media format, the Memory Stick.
Then they released another model that forced everyone to buy a different overpriced Memory Stick. Then they released an upgrade that forced everyone to buy yet another model of Memory Stick. Then they ditched the optical drive, fully screwing over customers who'd put up with all of that shit, and amassed some library of legitimate games.
The Vita was like the Dreamcast: being good didn't matter. Customers and developers alike simply were not interested. The trust was gone, and the ecosystem did not develop.
Sony's real fuckup was not embracing PS VR. Yeah, it was kind of a gimmick, but it was their gimmick. They stumbled into a massive share of a niche market for expensive gizmos. Sony, of all companies, should've leapt at that on instinct. Instead they let the VR revival dwindle, with early PC adopters burned by Oculus selling out to fucking Facebook, and the PS5 having no follow-up headset. It effortlessly could have been their thing. They had the money to gobble up second- and third-party studios, desperately seeking "exclusives." All of those could have had 3D TV support, for the giant virtual television you should obviously get from any non-VR PS5 game.
Anyway - they have PS5 VR headset now, but the momentum is gone. It doesn't even work with the VR games they already fucking had. Sony, of all companies, should know exactly what backwards compatibility is worth, as both a number and a narrative.