Consoles have essentially become obsolete, while PC gaming is at an all-time high.

Consoles are more expensive than video cards, except you can’t upgrade them. GPU processing power hasn’t been jumping exponentially, like it had in the past, so you can still play most anything with a decent 5-year-old card. Hell, with AAA gaming falling behind indie games, there’s not really a point in investing so much in graphical output, and you have far far more indie game options with PC.

Console exclusives are a thing of the past, so everybody has the option to jump ship to a PC version. While some of the console->PC ports can be pretty bad, most are starting as PC-first and then moving to console, which ends up with bad porting quality happening in the other direction. Exclusives used to be a huge driver of buying a console (like Metroid Prime for GameCube or FF7 for Playstation), and now PCs have the most access to almost every game.

Steam Decks are starting to drive the industry, pushing Linux gaming to the highest its ever been, and is making Nintendo worried enough to push Switch 2 as a competitor. A vast vast majority of PC games are on Steam, and a vast majority of games in general are on PC. So, accessibility to play just about anything you want on both PC and on a portable Steam Deck makes it way more attractive than anything the consoles could provide.

Consoles are already dead. They just need another 10-15 years before their respective industry leaders finally realize that. At best, Nintendo would carve a market with their own brand of exclusivity and first-party titles, but even that will fall.

This whole generation has been messed up from the word go. Scalpers ruined my chances of getting a PS5 (and I went with Xbox for the very first time since they had a payment program) and I’m still very sore about that. Anyone remember “Oh Deer”?

Nintendo doing whatever the fuck they want, making the Switch last the Wii U’s latter-half of a generation and then its own generation. The Switch 2 coming in so late to this generation that you have to wonder if we can even call them Nintendo/PlayStation/Xbox generations anymore and instead it’s PlayStation/Xbox with Nintendo it’s own category of generations now.

Xbox making a high-end console with a mid console and forcing the same games to be released for both. Sounds extremely consumer friendly, but made things a headache for developers who probably felt held back by it.

Sony…where do I begin. I guess my main gripe with them is that they’re still giving the middle finger to PS3 backwards compatibility on PS5. (Yes I know about the Cell and blah blah blah. Don’t care. Make it happen, get my money. Capice?) The PS5 Pro might’ve been where I finally hopped on, but eh. My PS4 Pro is still going strong and they don’t have anything that entices me to make the leap after I invested in Xbox Series X.

And so many games being cross-gen this time around. Holly hell. I understand why that is, but I feel like this is the most blah generation ever. There have been some awesome games for sure, but overall it felt not very exciting.

And Microsoft not really seeming to care about all this because they feel they’re on a different plane of existence now and consoles are trivial to them since your toaster can now play Xbox games.

So instead of having a 3-way drumline competition, they’re just parading off in different random directions through town.

Microsoft not shooting themselves in the foot every chance they get challenge (impossible)

I am lucky enough to have both the PS5 and the Xbox and personally find very little to pick out between them. I prefer XB controller but think the PS5 one is better quality with the haptic feedback. I love Game Pass and have found tremendous value in it, more so than in PlayStations version though PS still manage to get exclusives.

Mind you the way some of these articles sound is that the whole Xbox gaming division is on its knees and doesn’t sell a machine or make a penny.

TBH, I can’t remember the last time I turned on any of my consoles for anything other than 4K movies.

This generation has just been awful for games, the Covid drop just never recovered.

Will look at Avowed, but not feeling great about it. Dumping games in Jan/Feb generally is not a good look (OTOH you get the occasional Hi Fi Rush instead of Forspoken).