Bobbyaro wrote:
It's a fair point actually, badly put as usual, but if the price of a PS4 is less than the equivalent PC, why would you buy the PS4? there may be exclusive games, but if this generation has shown anything the good ones are few and far between (and will probably be hacked to run on a PC anyway).
Sorry yes I did put that badly but the point stands, what is the USP of the consoles going to be next generation?
Looking back....
<< You can go back further than this of course, Megadrive and SNES and NES and Master System and so on, but they're more of the same, arcadey consoley easy-to-use experiences were the domain of the game console, and computers were a fucking nightmare. >>
PS1/Saturn era - The PC had absolutely nothing to compare with the likes of Ridge Racer on the PS1, or Sega Rally on the Saturn. Does anyone remember what arcadey/consoley games were like on the PC back then? They were FUCKING AWFUL, if you could even get the bastard things running at all.
If you were a serious gamer at this time, you had one of these consoles, or most likely, both of them. (Mine are still in a box downstairs.)
ALSO NOTE - Some very clever custom hardware that delivered incredible performance out of a tiny box at a time when PCs were hideous, huge, unreliable, temperamental nightmares for playing games on.
PS2/Dreamcast/XBox era - More of the same really. The Dreamcast delivered 'arcade in a little box' and the PS2 delivered the likes of GTA3, the XBox was a bit of a dark horse but there was still awesome stuff like the best versions of the Burnout games, and of course you could chip them.
Again, if you were a gamer, you had one or two or all three of these, the PC was slowly starting to catch up in a lot of ways, but nothing could match the console experience overall. (My PS2 and Dreamcast are still in a box downstairs, my chipped XBox still sees reasonably regular use as a MAMEOX machine and is still connected to the big telly.)
ALSO NOTE - Some very clever custom hardware that delivered incredible performance out of a tiny box at a time when PCs were slightly less hideous, huge, unreliable, temperamental nightmares for playing games on. Better than they were, but still a bit of a pain in the fucking arse overall.
(And I'm not forgetting the Nintendo consoles, but IMO they've always been about the Nintendo exclusives and nothing else, but maybe that's just me.)
360/PS3 era - Out of the gates these consoles got the drop on the PC, personally speaking I ended up with two 360s, an early 20GB JET TURBINE Xenos model and then a later Jasper chipset model. Games like Ridge Racer 6 weren't available on the PC, even though PCs were mostly capable of running them. Plus of course there was the whole XBLA thing going on, and friends lists, and achievements, and a really cohesive connected online experience - and at the time the 360's blade interface was a nice, simple, intuitive design for a games machine.
The PC had Steam and it was mostly OK but nothing like the experience it is today. As before, if you wanted your games to be of the highest standard and conveniently available, you had a 360 or a PS3.
ALSO NOTE - I'd say the PC not only hit parity with the consoles this generation, but then beat them at their own game, certainly in terms of game experience, and mostly in terms of ease of use as well. YMMV on that one, though.
Next-gen - Seriously, what's the point? We know for a fact that the PS4 and 720 will be mid-range PCs stuffed into little boxes, you'll get your Sony or Microsoft 'operating system', and you'll get more of what a lot of folks hated this generation, forced updates to the consoles, forced updates to games, advertising, DLC, increasingly internet-connected requirement, cracking down on pre-owned and so on.
You could very much argue that a Windows based PC is already a lot more open and less fucked with than the 360's dashboard, which bombards you with advertisements and forced updates that move everything around whether you like it or not.
On top of that, the hardware of the next-gen consoles is going to become obsolete sooner rather than later, but unlike a PC that you can easily and cheaply upgrade as time goes by, the consoles are going to be stuck with a fixed architecture, something that really made itself felt with the 360 and PS3 as it became increasingly apparent that they weren't up to the job of running what was being asked of them. (And I'd say it's a safe bet there'll be laptops inside a couple of years that roughly match the spec of the PS4 and 720.)
The other wildcard here of course is the Steambox, which really could change everything and make both the next-gen consoles look a bit daft, but it remains to be seen on that one.
The fact here, and it is a fact, is that hardware for the next-gen is going to be completely homogenised - it's all mainstream PC stuff, CPU, GPU, RAM - the works.
All you're really going to be choosing is what you want the box to look like and what 'operating system' you want to run, with games development (certainly for the 'big stuff') having never been more expensive, very few developers are going to want to go down the exclusive route - so it's a safe bet that 95% of the big titles will come out across all the platforms.
That's all I'm saying, there are no 'games consoles' any more in the traditional sense, just PCs in little boxes.