Full disclosure, I’m a PC gamer. So I’m a little biased. However I personally see more value in old consoles from 2nd to 6th generation. In the old consoles all had their own advantages. NES games were customizable, TG16 was more powerful, SNES had Mode7, Genesis was faster, PC had more input and provided a more free market to developers, PS1 was easy to develop for and so on. They had special hardware. They had different controllers and appealed to different kinds of gamers and were more convenient. It doesn’t seem like that anymore, you leave the system off for a while you boot it back up and there are gigabytes of updates, they just use off the shelf AMD cards, they all for the most part offer the same games and are getting more and more expensive. Switch is saved by it’s portability and the stellar first party line up, but same cannot be said for Series X and PS5. Playstation in particular is borderline worthless, as it’s exclusive line up can be stereotyped as “movies that make you press buttons to make sure you pay attention” it seems more logical to just watch a playthrough of them. Combine that with the fact AAA games suck across the board, it makes more sense to just build a midrange PC and play indie games in them or to buy the FPGA systems made by Analogue for example. What do you guys think?
Worst thing I have realised recently is that consoles are basically okay computers which are rendered practically useless because of vendor lockdown. PS3 in the beginning (even if for it’s own nefarious reasons) allowed installing Linux but once hackers started exploiting vulnerabilities through it and allowed used to resist Sony extorting money from them they shut it down.
You can’t even use the browser properly on it. It’s absolute shit. Because of the fear of webkit exploits they don’t allow browser customisability too. So yeah, unless you are drinking the Sony/MS koolaid I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice by buying a console, which basically is a medium for the manufacturing company to collect rent from you.
Yeah, this is why I disagree with the argument that consoles provide better value. Yes PCs are more expensive but you can also do more with them.
True, but not everyone needs a powerful PC. If you have a PC capable of running modern games you can then probably edit videos, do 3D rendering, etc. But a vast plethora of people just need the ability to use a browser and text-editing programs, rather than use any specialized programs like that. And for the people that need those specialized programs then it was already kind of a given they’d also use it for gaming were they into it (unless they’re diehard Mac enthusiasts or what have you).
Doesn’t xbox have some “developer mode” that technically lets you run linux vm on it?