I’m going to try not to be too cynical in this article. This isn’t a bitter commentary on the current state of gaming, nor is it a wistful reminiscence of the past. It’s simply a realization I’ve been coming to for a while now, that I have been too stubborn to admit.
Anyone that has read anything I’ve written here, or knows me at all, knows that I’ve been in the gaming hobby for practically my entire life. Sure, I loved playing my cousin’s Intellivision when I was a kid, and when I got an NES for Christmas back in the 80’s, I was all over it. But I was a kid, and home gaming entertainment was the new hotness. It was a no-brainer.
But as I started to creep into my teenage years, and all my friends seemed to taper off of gaming, or only played their SNES occasionally, I stuck with it. I kept to my SNES and eventually N64, even though there were hotter systems hitting the shelves already. I only knew one person that had a Playstation back in high school, and I got to his house every chance I could to play Final Fantasy VII and Parasite Eve. But we still played NBA Jam and Super Bomberman 2 in the garage on Saturday nights, and we still crowded around the art room television playing Goldeneye multiplayer.
As I got older and started making my own money, I usually bought whatever new console came out. I wasn’t really loyal to any one brand; I have owned every generation of Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo console that have released. I even own the Dreamcast. And even though I had gravitated to one console or another each gen (the PS2 was my jam for a while), and eventually settled into the Xbox eco-system for good once the Xbox 360 rolled around, I have still been a multiplatform console gamer to my core. I’ve never really championed one system or another.
But this gen has sucked. And there are reasons for this that have been well documented by multitudes of Youtubers out there; it’s not just my personal hot take. It has been lackluster in all departments, by each of the Big Three.
Over the past two or three years, I have been slowly gravitating toward the PC space. This wasn’t even really a conscious decision; I bought a gaming PC a few years ago, because I’d never really had one. I’ve had PC’s that could play video games in the past, but that was back when it was the wild west– standards hadn’t really been set, and maybe your rig could run a game, maybe it couldn’t. You didn’t really know until you bought it and tried. And I never liked that.
But PC gaming now is different beast, and while I bemoan the fact that Nvidia and AMD have the PC market by the balls, it has standardized the market. Not only do most PC’s have hardware in them that are handily capable of running most games at a decent quality, but the optimization is generally much better since the developers know (more or less) what hardware is being utilized. Throw in target optimization for devices like the Steam Deck, and it’s even better. Yeah, I know it’s not quite that simple, but compared to PC gaming in the 90’s, trust me, it’s pretty damn straight-forward.
But even though I had my gaming PC, I still loved the console experience. I still bought a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, and I still own my Switch. But… they’ve lost something.
There’s no way I can talk about this without saying the “E-word.” Exclusivity. There, I said it.
I’ve never been a console warrior. Even though I gravitated toward Xbox and settled there, I never cared much for convincing anyone else that my choice was better than theirs. It wasn’t worth the energy. Besides, how could I tell someone to buy an Xbox instead of a Playstation when I had both consoles sitting side-by-side on my TV stand? It never made much sense to me.
Anyway, exclusivity always factored into the equation, even if it was a subconscious thing at the time. I bought Nintendo consoles because they had Legend of Zelda. I bought a Playstation because I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII and Silent Hill. And I bought an Xbox because… well I will admit, I didn’t know a damn thing about Xbox. I bought it because the PS2 and Gamecube had hit a bit of a drout and I was bored. But then I learned about Halo, and then Forza came along, and I bought a 360 for those.
And that has been the gaming landscape for most of our gaming lives. But as I said above, something’s been lost. But it’s not the “exclusivity.” There are still a handful of those, and Nintendo still has all of their titles exclusive to their platform. What’s lost is the excitement. What’s lost is the experience. What’s lost is the individuality.
Owning a specific console meant getting an experience that the others didn’t offer. The Playstation gave us cinematics, CD-quality audio, and longer games that the N64 or previous 16-bit consoles just couldn’t do. The N64 introduced us to true analog movement, which Sony didn’t have until later. The Xbox gave us online multiplayer, an internal hard drive, and voice chat. It wasn’t just the games I was playing, it was the way I was playing them.
Obviously, as competition goes, the other companies will always pick up on what makes the competitors successful. And that’s a good thing. That’s a healthy thing. When businesses compete, the consumer wins. It’s that adoption of the competition’s tech that gave Playstation users a good online service. It’s what gave Xbox users an integrated store. It’s what gave Nintendo users… ya know what I got nothin’. Nintendo always seems to ignore market trends and do whatever anyway. BUT, without the smashing success of the Nintendo Switch, PC gamers likely wouldn’t have the Steam Deck, or the ASUS ROG, or any of the others. We may have gotten them eventually, but it was Nintendo that proved there was a market.
Unfortunately, all that competition adoption has been leading to a homogenization of the industry, and they’re all kinda starting to offer what is, more or less, the same experience. As OhNoItsAlexx consistently states, “they’re just PC’s.” And he’s not wrong. The only one that has managed to maintain its individuality is Nintendo, and they’re turning me off to buying their products for different reasons, which I won’t get into here (but you can probably guess what they are.)
This all boils down to my current gaming situation; and it was something I wasn’t currently aware of, or maybe I was, and I was just indifferent. It wasn’t until a recent gaming experience I had that completely hammered it home. I won’t get into that just yet, as that’s for a future article, but needless to say it put a spotlight on how badly I had been lacking in a truly unique experience.
It begs the question, if there is a “next generation” of consoles, should I even bother? If I’m going to pay what is likely to be a shit-ton of money for what is relatively the same experience, what’s the point? None of the Playstation offerings this gen have made owning a PS5 worth it, in my opinion. The same goes for the Xbox Series X, if I’m honest. The vast majority of my gaming library being on Xbox helps, but if that wasn’t the case, I would probably have some buyer’s remorse. The PS5, with only the handful of exclusive titles (mostly back-compat PS4 games) hasn’t really made owning the console a worth-while investment, either. And I haven’t touched my Switch in literally months (and have not even purchased a Switch 2).
I seriously wonder if Nintendo even realizes what an ungodly amount of money they would make if they released their games on PC. Would there be piracy? Sure, but that’s the risk with anything on PC, and it hasn’t prevented other games from being insanely successful. I would buy Nintendo’s expensive-ass games in a heartbeat if I knew 1.) they’d be available for me indefinitely going forward, as the console’s hardware lifespan would be removed from the equation, and 2.) I could enjoy the games on modern hardware and not Nintendo’s consistently obsolete technology. But I’m getting off on a tangent…
The thing is, not only am I a pretty big gaming hobbyist (I write about it, ffs), I’m also a techie. I love my toys. But I have had my share of buyer’s remorse over the years as things I’ve purchased haven’t panned out, or the tech was solid but the service sucked, or whatever. And I’ve accumulated a lot of shit over the years. I may or may not be at the point in my life where instead of accumulating shit, I’m trying to reduce clutter (and old tech junk). So buying a new console might not be in my best interest anymore. If I can have one PC that runs everything, or mostly everything, that may be the best thing for me.
Unless of course, they offer a better experience. Then I’d be right back in again.
