An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's revenue from Xbox console sales was down a whopping 42 percent on a year-over-year basis for the quarter ending in June, the company announced in its latest earnings report. The massive drop continues a long, pronounced slide for sal...
Also accurate. But it’s looking like we’ll still have $500 machines called Xboxes and PlayStations, except they’ll just be fancy PCs. That’s my guess anyway.
They already are just PCs and have been since the PS4/XBone. It’s all just slightly customized PC hardware inside.
Even as far back as the first xbox, I remember some people installing Linux on it. It’s also why Halo later came out for the PC, because porting it wasn’t that difficult. Iirc, the first xbox didn’t run any Windows kernel but it did use direct x.
They don’t run the same executables that Steam does though, and I think that’s what’s about to change.
Possibly. I can see Xbox backing out personally, and just putting their games on PC and the other consoles.
Sony will probably carry on… and Nintendo likely has a detailed business plan for the next 100 years.
Sony’s already not carrying on. They’ve started putting their games on PC, which is a market that is, for the first time, larger than their console for the same game releases. Nintendo’s got another generation of hardware before they’ll need to change anything.
They started putting games on PC, but their plan is to make sequels console-exclusive.
Sony hopes PC gamers, who’ll wait years for Epic exclusives to come to Steam out of spite, will buy PS5s for exclusive sequels.
That’s what they say publicly, yes. Because if they tell their customers right now that they plan to dramatically shorten that window, they’re shooting themselves in the foot early.
Fair - I’d be surprised if they haven’t already been working on a ps6 for years though.
In my mind Nintendo is going to be more or less immune to the death of the console market. They did have done a really, really good job at making fun games since the 80s, and have also traditionally had the cheapest hardware (not that that will matter if the competition goes away). I might impulsively buy whatever Nintendo’s next console is just for Zelda or Metroid, even though Nintendo as a company pisses me off.