Microsoft’s success on PlayStation points to the future

This is the sensible part of Microsoft's strategy. The blood sacrifice of profitable studios, nah, that has no upside. That's just burning money and scattering talent. But everything related to DirectX, from the beginning, was about PC-ifying the console market. Job done. They fumbled the part where they assumed they'd still control the PC market, but hey, close enough for empty suits.

The question for Sony is: do consoles still matter? The war ending does not grant them a monopoly. They're now just another platform for most games. Which people jokingly insist means "Playstation has no games," three generations in a row, because Playstation has very few exclusive games.

Nintendo makes that shit work by being incomparable. They sold the only tablet with buttons. Somehow. And even with the Steam Deck doing well, the Switch outsold it by approximately five zillion. If that changes, Nintendo can fall back on the goofy shit the Joycons can do. That's how they pull genres and mechanics out of their ass, while Sony spends seven years crafting yet another Ubisoft knockoff. Y'know, one of those games where you fuck a map.

Hardware experimentation is not viable, outside of goofy shit.

When Sony entered the market, every console got unique games because nobody knew what they were doing. The only 90s machine to do 3D sensibly was the Dreamcast, and it did not help. But once several engines worked identically on PS2, Windows, and sometimes even Mac, the writing was on the wall. Software has won. Hardware has been forced into such lock-step that even phones have raytracing cores. So what's the difference? It's only a numbers game, a race to the bottom.

And the company most responsible might be too dysfunctional to even gloat properly.

2 comments

Microsoft doesn't care about Xbox. They stated it. They are now a very big publisher (since they bought every big studio) and of course they are goin the same path as Sony: publishing exclusives on other platform (aka Windows for Sony and Ps for Ms) after a while.
This is the sensible part of Microsoft's strategy. The blood sacrifice of profitable studios, nah, that has no upside. That's just burning money and scattering talent. But everything related to DirectX, from the beginning, was about PC-ifying the console market. Job done. They fumbled the part where they assumed they'd still control the PC market, but hey, close enough for empty suits.
The question for Sony is: do consoles still matter? The war ending does not grant them a monopoly. They're now just another platform for most games. Which people jokingly insist means "Playstation has no games," three generations in a row, because Playstation has very few exclusive games.
Nintendo makes that shit work by being incomparable. They sold the only tablet with buttons. Somehow. And even with the Steam Deck doing well, the Switch outsold it by approximately five zillion. If that changes, Nintendo can fall back on the goofy shit the Joycons can do. That's how they pull genres and mechanics out of their ass, while Sony spends seven years crafting yet another Ubisoft knockoff. Y'know, one of those games where you fuck a map.
Hardware experimentation is not viable, outside of goofy shit.
When Sony entered the market, every console got unique games because nobody knew what they were doing. The only 90s machine to do 3D sensibly was the Dreamcast, and it did not help. But once several engines worked identically on PS2, Windows, and sometimes even Mac, the writing was on the wall. Software has won. Hardware has been forced into such lock-step that even phones have raytracing cores. So what's the difference? It's only a numbers game, a race to the bottom.
And the company most responsible might be too dysfunctional to even gloat properly.