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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I'm gonna get downvoted for this but... gaming consoles.
Gaming consoles made sense back in the day before home computing took off, and for a while they actually had superior hardware than computers when it came specifically to running games. But nowadays gaming consoles are just locked down user-hostile computers with a subscription service attached. The gaming equivalent of inkjet printers. It's an industry made irrelevant by advancements in technology, propped up by misleading marketing and artificial hype that sadly many people fall for.
I have a PS5 because it will play the damned games. There's nothing in the PC realm for $400 I could buy that could come close to guaranteeing the same thing. Consoles don't exist because people are stupid, they exist because gaming and GPU companies are cartels just like almost every other sector of the economy.
There is value in static hardware so you can perform specific optimizations and target framerate. The subscriptions are 100% bullshit though.
New PC graphics cards alone cost as much as entire games consoles. The top end ones cost the same as multiple PS5s. That's why consoles exist.
Consoles don't make money, the expensive games and subscriptions do.
You are underestimating the importance of standards here. On a PC you will always only get a fraction of the hardware's power, because there's way more stuff running at the same time, not just the game, and because the developers can't know exactly what hardware configuration every single gamer has. On a console you can know exactly how much RAM you will have available, so you can design your content to use that amount of data and then stream it into memory that you reserve at the start. If you do that on a PC you may ask for more RAM than the PC has or you may leave RAM unused. Or you can try to optimize the game for different specs, which costs time and money, so you won't get the same results with the same budget.
Back in the olden days when games were written in assembly and there was barely enough memory for a framebuffer it made sense to tediously optimize games to squeeze every bit of performance out of the limited hardware. Modern consoles are not like that. They have their own operating systems with schedulers, multitasking, and memory allocators, much like a desktop computer. Your claim that "way more stuff is running at the same time" is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game (which can be a feature in and of itself -- think recording/streaming, discord, etc.) It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu. Some games can even automatically select the best graphics options that will get the most out of your hardware. What you're describing is a non-problem.
'Your claim that "way more stuff is running at the same time" is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game' - So did you deliberately decide to run virus scanners, Microsoft telemetry, anti-cheat-software, preloaders for browsers like Chrome so they start up faster, explorer plugins and the usual assortment of bloat- and malware? No offense, but thinking that nothing ran on your computer unless you deliberately start it is naive. Why do you think there are so many "PC-Cleaner"-Tools? Even for Android there are "game modes" and "memory cleaners". I have never seen anything similar on a gaming console.
'It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu.' - And what do you think who designs the content that you choose from in that menu? When artists create meshes and textures they have to decide on resolution and polygon count. If your graphics card simply does not have that much memory then the performance is going to drop significantly. So if you want to have the option to lower the graphics settings you need to have assets that require less memory. I mean sure, some engines offer generic settings menus and there are algorithms that lower the memory footprint of assets algorithmically, but if course the result won't be the same as if the assets were manually designed for that size. And if the assets are designed for a lower footprint a slider won't be able to magically add details. The same applies for shaders. If the performance of the hardware is not sufficient a generic settings menus will only switch off effects, and unless you create an alternative the result may look pretty rough.
So that settings menu may be a solution for the players, but for the developers it means that all the options you can choose from need to be developed and tested, and that takes time and money.
Steam deck makes sense
You're not wrong. There definitely used to be a difference back when consoles would get way better support and PC ports were terrible.
-- The entire options menu of a PC port in like 2006.
But nowadays I struggle to understand the point of getting one of those big chonky tower consoles like whatever the latest Xbox or PlayStation is. (PlayStation even selling entirely new consoles for a simple graphics/RAM upgrade, smh).
At least the Switch's portability made sense.
The old consoles also were just plug the game in and boot up.
No Hassle.
Now they sounds like Windows boxes.
I LOVED how the original X-Box had an "desktop" in it. Unfortunately that's gone way too far anymore.
Nowadays I find these interfaces so overly complicated and fiddly that it makes the UX of an N64 far superior.
I pretty much went PC-only after the xbox 360 though, when ports finally started getting good. :)
I downvoted you just because you're one of those people who is literally asking for it.
My god, how can I possibly recover from this!? My lemmy reputation has been tainted forever!!!