8 ms·

Game consoles are doing better than ever

72 points by joeyespo 9y ago

lostgame 9y ago
I think people predicted the crash of console gaming because they expected mobile gaming to eclipse it. What realistically happened was the forging of a new market, which will not stop folks from buying a console for a solid, reliable piece of dedicated gaming hardware.
- meritt 9y ago
  I don't think it's hardware at all. I think it's quality of the games. The vast majority of mobile games are all the same type we've seen since they first crept-up on Facebook a decade ago: Farmville-clones, Tower Defense or Endless Runners with an all-encompassing focus on cash shops and in-game advertising. Console and PC gaming (with the obvious exception of certain conglomerates) tend to be focused on a gaming experience that isn't just a monetization treadmill.
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    They're also focused on an entirely different use case: a console is for playing games possibly hours at a time. Mobile games are designed for playing in chunks measured in minutes.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I do game on my mobile devices, but only non gamers can think that they had any chance against game consoles. Indies are learning the hard way how the crash of 1983 came to be. Yes, there are lots of junk games in consoles, after going through the certification process that Nintendo brought to the industry as recovery from the crash, which means even worse ones did not managed to be certified. Mobile app stores don't have any bar to meet, beyond a quite basic set of checkpoints by console gaming standards, so finding good quality games is quite hard and worse given the race to bottom, most studios don't get to pay the overall development efforts.
  - Feniks 9y ago
    The media didn't really talk to gamers. Looking back its clear the media really bought into the "everything is going to be smartphones" and "Apple is going to kill Sony, Microsoft, Google and God by the grace of Steve Jobs". Nowadays its ofcourse Amazon that they can't shut up about. Basically predictions suck and we all laugh about them a few years later.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the only people that thought phone games would replace console/PC "real" games were people that aren't gamers.
  - lostgame 9y ago
    Completely agree. This was part of my point not well laid out.
- Const-me 9y ago
  I think they expected console vendors to do what they did for decades before that: design custom chips. Designing a good CPU/SoC became so much expensive that no single console vendor can do good enough. Fortunately for them, Sony/Nintendo/MS stopped designing custom processors for their consoles, and instead adopted hardware designed by AMD, nVidia and ARM.
- segmondy 9y ago
  I was one of those people who thought as much, couldn't predict it. Mobile gaming is all about gamification. To keep you playing through tricks so you can watch ads or spend more buying game items. Console gaming is all about game play.
  - setr 9y ago
    I believe most multiplayer games have learned the art of gambling mechanics at this point, at least partly as a result of its extreme success in the mobile market. Randomized item/skin unlocks, short-exp leveling, etc. And of course, dlc add-ons has just been getting bigger each year. AAA's are getting worse about "gamification", and I think its going to continue. Mobile didnt take over, but its successes won't be so simply forgotten
- msabalau 9y ago
  Consoles provide experiences that mobile games can't. That said, mobile has eclipsed consoles. 11% growth to $3.3 billion in the US. But by way of contrast, Pokemon Go hit a billion in revenue by itself last February.
metavrsl 9y ago
I'd argue that the future of games consoles is still in jeapordy, but the doom and gloom arguments of 2012 were premature. The Nintendo switch is a perfect conceptual example of what the smartphone could turn into, in terms of gaming. It all runs on mobile hardware, with Nvidia Tegra powering the graphics. What's to stop Apple or other companies supporting slot in controllers on the side of the phones? I think it's inevitable that companies take influence from the switch. Once we have 'switches' using the iPhone or Samsung galaxies, etc, I think there's no turning back. Then you can just cast that video feed to the TV a la Switch dock, just over wireless connection. Of course it will take a while to build up the infrastructure for it, but this idea seems obvious.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Your phone is a phone. You could game on it, but I don’t see hardcore console gamers using it as their primary console for tv gaming. Better to have a dedicated device with it’s own storage and environment built for games.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The Switch wins because of the games behind it. Even with a nice dock that's never coming to a phone because those companies don't get games. I'd also argue the Switch isn't really a console It's a mobile that can dock (and Nintendo has dominated mobile gaming for 20+ years, so that's not new). It's really underpowered. Playing BotW on a TV at 920p 30 frames is ok, but it's still way below the other real consoles, which can push pusedo-4k. That's really impressive, and may account for some of their popularity. Both the Xbox and PS4 have been really solid systems without lots of the flaws of their predecessors.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > The Switch wins because of the games behind it. You could have said the same thing for the WiiU (while not a fully portable console per se): It had a few excellent games, but nobody wanted it. It's not as simple as that.
    - 9y ago
333c 9y ago
This makes me wonder if the increasing costs of GPUs due to crypto mining has led some consumers to purchase a console when they would have otherwise bought a PC.
- phil248 9y ago
  You can still get a video card that can play 90% of current games at max settings for around $200-$250, same as 10 years ago. But the upper end does seem to have expanded and become more expensive.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Try finding a 1060 6gb, 1070 or a 580 in stock at anywhere near MSRP.
    - phil248 9y ago
      I stand corrected. I've been buying a new video card every 2-4 years for 20+ years and I have never seen these kind of markups or out of stock items.
      - croon 9y ago
        Everyone and their aunt are buying them for the last couple of months out of the crypto craze, for mining. Whether it's worth it I don't know, but it's annoying for the rest of us who want to get one.
    - rosege 9y ago
      I bought a 1070 almost exactly a year ago for $460 from Amazon - now I see its not sold by Amazon anymore and the few resellers have it priced at $1100. Evga themselves have it at $540 with a limit of 1 per customer.
  - huckyaus 9y ago
    Whether a game can run smoothly on max settings is heavily resolution dependent; the difference in GPU power required to run a game at 1080p vs 1440p is quite substantial.
pwaai 9y ago
For me it was the comfort factor. I used to be a PC gamer after I grew out of PSX in the early 2000s...but lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on. I found gaming on the console to be a good context switch to relax and in the comfort of a living room on a sofa vs. hunched over keyboard and mouse. FPS games were weird at first to play on a ps3/ps4 controller but I found other constraints helpful such as the lack of text chat which let me just focus on the game. Overall I enjoy the simplification from getting into a match, not have to worry about hardware upgrades (its okay to not have the ultimate graphics), not having to argue in text chats etc...all from the comfort of a couch
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on Living room PCs are also a thing. Boot directly into Steam, with a Steam Controller to play mouse games with the gamepad, and it's mostly a fine experience, and it gets better every year. Added bonus, you can run games at much better framerates and resolution than a console ever could. And "upgrading" is not needed that often. I have a 3 years old card that is still running most games at high details, even recent ones.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You do still run into the same problem that using a controller on a mobile device has: when you're using a minority input device, many games are not designed for you. The top-selling PC games are not best experienced with controller, even a Steam Controller. You can very easily find yourself buying a game that claims controller support yet really does need a keyboard and mouse. With a console, you know every single game on the system is made for your exact use case. And I say this as a mostly PC gamer with an Xbox controller plugged into his PC.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      You can avoid that risk by buyIng games that are clearly labelled as controller supported in Steam. As in, the keyboard is never required. For games where you would typically require a keyboard the Steam controller's flexible mapping tool makes it easy to map many keys on the controller. I can even play keyboard intensive games like warhammer40k DoW3 with it. And the Pc world is all about choice. I can decide to grab a Dual Shock 4 or Xbox360 controller instead of my Steam Controller and it will work just as well. You just cannot expect any kind of flexibility on consoles: they are built to be disposed off a few years down the road.
shiado 9y ago
Just wait until somebody builds some easy to deploy Linux distro called PS4MinerOS. Does anybody know how cost effective the hardware in modern consoles would be for crypto mining?
supercanuck 9y ago
For me, playing mobile games is essentially like playing Slot machines. Its this reason i don't let me kids play games on their mobile device. It makes more sense just buying a Switch, which allows more interactive play with people, more coop and time limits without the feeling their is a slot machine effect happening
- ntSean 9y ago
  Thats a very broad statement, there are a lot of great mobile games that aren't slot machines - even some from Nintendo. Mario Run, Threes, Alto's Adventure, SPL-T, Reigns, Leap Day - phew, and thats off the top of my head; there's a lot of choice on the App Store.
  - makecheck 9y ago
    The real problem is that the App Store provides no search filters of any kind and nearly-useless browsing. If you could simply say “show me only games with no slot machines”, the experience would be so much better.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - croon 9y ago
    While I loved Alto's Adventure (and some more of those), and it was by no means aggregious, it does include things like watching ads to continue your run (at least once), and other microtransactions. I don't think I'm a reactionary, and this is a problem on consoles and PC as well, but there is a lot of difference between mobile games and games where you buy an entire experience and everything relevant is designed into that system. Nothing is gated, you can make it easier through a difficulty setting, you can't make it easier by paying extra dollars. Note that I avoid anything last 5 years EA and similar that can't for the life of them design games that respect their customers.
- raguuu 9y ago
  Major thing that pissed me off recently: My kid likes to play solitaire. on one Windows 10 machine I see him opening the game and an freaking AD pops up. It made me angry. To my surprise the ad was for a slot game on Windows store. I tell him to open the ad and the game is literally a casino, where you buy "credit", so you won't play for money. This really pissed me off that Microsoft is pushing casino ads on my machine where I have paid for the licence. I have given thousands of euros through my life for Microsoft with licence fees. I wanted to literally shake someone high up on Microsoft for allowing to push casino for my child.
poisonborz 9y ago
TBH everything is thriving. Mobile games, PC (Steam), even board games are having a renaissance. A geekier, more tech-oriented generation is growing up, and the market is expanding in every direction.
- pandaman 9y ago
  Just like the article says in the very beginning: in 2011-2012, when Zynga was "the next big thing" and the ps3/x360 successors have not been revealed yet, every ( * ) article about the games industry was essentially about how the consoles came to the end, mobile and social games destroyed them and even if there is going to be a next generation of consoles - it's going to be definitely the last one. ( * ) it's an exaggeration, there probably were some other articles somewhere but the vast majority was about the decline of console business.
bluedino 9y ago
A friend of mine bought a MAME cabinet about ten years back. I've replace a couple pieces on it here and there, hard drive, monitor, but it's still pretty much the same as is was back then. We might play it twice a week, but nothing beats drinking a couple games and battling it out in some classic games.
kemonocode 9y ago
I mean, it certainly helps that the mobile market is plagued with freemium scum, and the current obsession with GPU-mined cryptocurrencies has greatly reduced the value proposal for a new rig if you don't want to mess with that with PCs. Under those lenses, then yes, a console suddenly looks quite attractive as a cheaper, more curated option.
- WillReplyfFood 9y ago
  If you want to hurt those guys- buy a click farm audience and set them loose on a game. The moment theire add-customers realize what part of the "userbase" is- its GONE, what a nice woody sort of word.
petraeus 9y ago
Dont forget xbox live is a million times better than anything pc has

72 points by joeyespo 9y ago

I think people predicted the crash of console gaming because they expected mobile gaming to eclipse it. What realistically happened was the forging of a new market, which will not stop folks from buying a console for a solid, reliable piece of dedicated gaming hardware.

meritt 9y ago
I don't think it's hardware at all. I think it's quality of the games. The vast majority of mobile games are all the same type we've seen since they first crept-up on Facebook a decade ago: Farmville-clones, Tower Defense or Endless Runners with an all-encompassing focus on cash shops and in-game advertising. Console and PC gaming (with the obvious exception of certain conglomerates) tend to be focused on a gaming experience that isn't just a monetization treadmill.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  They're also focused on an entirely different use case: a console is for playing games possibly hours at a time. Mobile games are designed for playing in chunks measured in minutes.
pjmlp 9y ago
I do game on my mobile devices, but only non gamers can think that they had any chance against game consoles. Indies are learning the hard way how the crash of 1983 came to be. Yes, there are lots of junk games in consoles, after going through the certification process that Nintendo brought to the industry as recovery from the crash, which means even worse ones did not managed to be certified. Mobile app stores don't have any bar to meet, beyond a quite basic set of checkpoints by console gaming standards, so finding good quality games is quite hard and worse given the race to bottom, most studios don't get to pay the overall development efforts.
- Feniks 9y ago
  The media didn't really talk to gamers. Looking back its clear the media really bought into the "everything is going to be smartphones" and "Apple is going to kill Sony, Microsoft, Google and God by the grace of Steve Jobs". Nowadays its ofcourse Amazon that they can't shut up about. Basically predictions suck and we all laugh about them a few years later.
sotojuan 9y ago
Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the only people that thought phone games would replace console/PC "real" games were people that aren't gamers.
- lostgame 9y ago
  Completely agree. This was part of my point not well laid out.
Const-me 9y ago
I think they expected console vendors to do what they did for decades before that: design custom chips. Designing a good CPU/SoC became so much expensive that no single console vendor can do good enough. Fortunately for them, Sony/Nintendo/MS stopped designing custom processors for their consoles, and instead adopted hardware designed by AMD, nVidia and ARM.
segmondy 9y ago
I was one of those people who thought as much, couldn't predict it. Mobile gaming is all about gamification. To keep you playing through tricks so you can watch ads or spend more buying game items. Console gaming is all about game play.
- setr 9y ago
  I believe most multiplayer games have learned the art of gambling mechanics at this point, at least partly as a result of its extreme success in the mobile market. Randomized item/skin unlocks, short-exp leveling, etc. And of course, dlc add-ons has just been getting bigger each year. AAA's are getting worse about "gamification", and I think its going to continue. Mobile didnt take over, but its successes won't be so simply forgotten
msabalau 9y ago
Consoles provide experiences that mobile games can't. That said, mobile has eclipsed consoles. 11% growth to $3.3 billion in the US. But by way of contrast, Pokemon Go hit a billion in revenue by itself last February.

metavrsl 9y ago

I'd argue that the future of games consoles is still in jeapordy, but the doom and gloom arguments of 2012 were premature. The Nintendo switch is a perfect conceptual example of what the smartphone could turn into, in terms of gaming. It all runs on mobile hardware, with Nvidia Tegra powering the graphics. What's to stop Apple or other companies supporting slot in controllers on the side of the phones? I think it's inevitable that companies take influence from the switch. Once we have 'switches' using the iPhone or Samsung galaxies, etc, I think there's no turning back. Then you can just cast that video feed to the TV a la Switch dock, just over wireless connection. Of course it will take a while to build up the infrastructure for it, but this idea seems obvious.

matte_black 9y ago
Your phone is a phone. You could game on it, but I don’t see hardcore console gamers using it as their primary console for tv gaming. Better to have a dedicated device with it’s own storage and environment built for games.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
The Switch wins because of the games behind it. Even with a nice dock that's never coming to a phone because those companies don't get games. I'd also argue the Switch isn't really a console It's a mobile that can dock (and Nintendo has dominated mobile gaming for 20+ years, so that's not new). It's really underpowered. Playing BotW on a TV at 920p 30 frames is ok, but it's still way below the other real consoles, which can push pusedo-4k. That's really impressive, and may account for some of their popularity. Both the Xbox and PS4 have been really solid systems without lots of the flaws of their predecessors.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > The Switch wins because of the games behind it. You could have said the same thing for the WiiU (while not a fully portable console per se): It had a few excellent games, but nobody wanted it. It's not as simple as that.
  - 9y ago

333c 9y ago

This makes me wonder if the increasing costs of GPUs due to crypto mining has led some consumers to purchase a console when they would have otherwise bought a PC.

phil248 9y ago
You can still get a video card that can play 90% of current games at max settings for around $200-$250, same as 10 years ago. But the upper end does seem to have expanded and become more expensive.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Try finding a 1060 6gb, 1070 or a 580 in stock at anywhere near MSRP.
  - phil248 9y ago
    I stand corrected. I've been buying a new video card every 2-4 years for 20+ years and I have never seen these kind of markups or out of stock items.
    - croon 9y ago
      Everyone and their aunt are buying them for the last couple of months out of the crypto craze, for mining. Whether it's worth it I don't know, but it's annoying for the rest of us who want to get one.
  - rosege 9y ago
    I bought a 1070 almost exactly a year ago for $460 from Amazon - now I see its not sold by Amazon anymore and the few resellers have it priced at $1100. Evga themselves have it at $540 with a limit of 1 per customer.
- huckyaus 9y ago
  Whether a game can run smoothly on max settings is heavily resolution dependent; the difference in GPU power required to run a game at 1080p vs 1440p is quite substantial.

pwaai 9y ago

For me it was the comfort factor. I used to be a PC gamer after I grew out of PSX in the early 2000s...but lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on. I found gaming on the console to be a good context switch to relax and in the comfort of a living room on a sofa vs. hunched over keyboard and mouse. FPS games were weird at first to play on a ps3/ps4 controller but I found other constraints helpful such as the lack of text chat which let me just focus on the game. Overall I enjoy the simplification from getting into a match, not have to worry about hardware upgrades (its okay to not have the ultimate graphics), not having to argue in text chats etc...all from the comfort of a couch

ekianjo 9y ago
> lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on Living room PCs are also a thing. Boot directly into Steam, with a Steam Controller to play mouse games with the gamepad, and it's mostly a fine experience, and it gets better every year. Added bonus, you can run games at much better framerates and resolution than a console ever could. And "upgrading" is not needed that often. I have a 3 years old card that is still running most games at high details, even recent ones.
- freehunter 9y ago
  You do still run into the same problem that using a controller on a mobile device has: when you're using a minority input device, many games are not designed for you. The top-selling PC games are not best experienced with controller, even a Steam Controller. You can very easily find yourself buying a game that claims controller support yet really does need a keyboard and mouse. With a console, you know every single game on the system is made for your exact use case. And I say this as a mostly PC gamer with an Xbox controller plugged into his PC.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    You can avoid that risk by buyIng games that are clearly labelled as controller supported in Steam. As in, the keyboard is never required. For games where you would typically require a keyboard the Steam controller's flexible mapping tool makes it easy to map many keys on the controller. I can even play keyboard intensive games like warhammer40k DoW3 with it. And the Pc world is all about choice. I can decide to grab a Dual Shock 4 or Xbox360 controller instead of my Steam Controller and it will work just as well. You just cannot expect any kind of flexibility on consoles: they are built to be disposed off a few years down the road.

shiado 9y ago

Just wait until somebody builds some easy to deploy Linux distro called PS4MinerOS. Does anybody know how cost effective the hardware in modern consoles would be for crypto mining?

supercanuck 9y ago

For me, playing mobile games is essentially like playing Slot machines. Its this reason i don't let me kids play games on their mobile device. It makes more sense just buying a Switch, which allows more interactive play with people, more coop and time limits without the feeling their is a slot machine effect happening

ntSean 9y ago
Thats a very broad statement, there are a lot of great mobile games that aren't slot machines - even some from Nintendo. Mario Run, Threes, Alto's Adventure, SPL-T, Reigns, Leap Day - phew, and thats off the top of my head; there's a lot of choice on the App Store.
- makecheck 9y ago
  The real problem is that the App Store provides no search filters of any kind and nearly-useless browsing. If you could simply say “show me only games with no slot machines”, the experience would be so much better.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- croon 9y ago
  While I loved Alto's Adventure (and some more of those), and it was by no means aggregious, it does include things like watching ads to continue your run (at least once), and other microtransactions. I don't think I'm a reactionary, and this is a problem on consoles and PC as well, but there is a lot of difference between mobile games and games where you buy an entire experience and everything relevant is designed into that system. Nothing is gated, you can make it easier through a difficulty setting, you can't make it easier by paying extra dollars. Note that I avoid anything last 5 years EA and similar that can't for the life of them design games that respect their customers.
raguuu 9y ago
Major thing that pissed me off recently: My kid likes to play solitaire. on one Windows 10 machine I see him opening the game and an freaking AD pops up. It made me angry. To my surprise the ad was for a slot game on Windows store. I tell him to open the ad and the game is literally a casino, where you buy "credit", so you won't play for money. This really pissed me off that Microsoft is pushing casino ads on my machine where I have paid for the licence. I have given thousands of euros through my life for Microsoft with licence fees. I wanted to literally shake someone high up on Microsoft for allowing to push casino for my child.

poisonborz 9y ago

TBH everything is thriving. Mobile games, PC (Steam), even board games are having a renaissance. A geekier, more tech-oriented generation is growing up, and the market is expanding in every direction.

pandaman 9y ago
Just like the article says in the very beginning: in 2011-2012, when Zynga was "the next big thing" and the ps3/x360 successors have not been revealed yet, every ( * ) article about the games industry was essentially about how the consoles came to the end, mobile and social games destroyed them and even if there is going to be a next generation of consoles - it's going to be definitely the last one. ( * ) it's an exaggeration, there probably were some other articles somewhere but the vast majority was about the decline of console business.

bluedino 9y ago

A friend of mine bought a MAME cabinet about ten years back. I've replace a couple pieces on it here and there, hard drive, monitor, but it's still pretty much the same as is was back then. We might play it twice a week, but nothing beats drinking a couple games and battling it out in some classic games.

kemonocode 9y ago

I mean, it certainly helps that the mobile market is plagued with freemium scum, and the current obsession with GPU-mined cryptocurrencies has greatly reduced the value proposal for a new rig if you don't want to mess with that with PCs. Under those lenses, then yes, a console suddenly looks quite attractive as a cheaper, more curated option.

WillReplyfFood 9y ago
If you want to hurt those guys- buy a click farm audience and set them loose on a game. The moment theire add-customers realize what part of the "userbase" is- its GONE, what a nice woody sort of word.

petraeus 9y ago

Dont forget xbox live is a million times better than anything pc has