Back in the 80’s, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today’s money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.
Now that Nintendo’s signaled to the rest of the industry it’s okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?
Well, I’m kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on.
Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5…exists and what’s an Xbox even for anymore?
People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they’re so much simpler than PCs to “just play” on, but that’s not really true anymore. My parents’ Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We’re in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs.
I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven’t published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.
I do miss the era when you just put the thing in the thing-shaped socket and the thing just worked.
Now you cannot do anything without setting accounts, downloading things, updating things and accepting tons of unread documents.
Or maybe I’m just getting old.
Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it’s getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game’s assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they’ll still require large downloads to function.
I’ve been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I’ve ever wanted to play was available with that combo…and I’m ditching Nintendo.
Two-fold problem: a) give the consumer freedom of choice b) make it difficult enough to successfully set it up once, and then stay locked in
That’s both by accident (provide freedom choice) and by design (lock them as long as possibile).