consoles predate gaming pcs and likely your existence. Your comment’s spirit is not false but it is a lie. do better
Comment on End of an era?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn’t really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there’s Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they’re the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the “Sony Rootkit” scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn’t at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this. Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will simply die.
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
If you go by the definition of “console” than includes things like the ZX Spectrum or the Amiga, then you are partly correct as all home computing started with such “consoles” (and then there was a time when it’s pretty much all PCs, and then came the modern consoles which are the ones I was talking about).
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
omg learn to write
LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
PC games are pretty much locked down to the original purchaser. Console games could be bought and sold used. Once I was done with a console generation I just sold everything on ebay and made back a bunch of my money (especially since I bought most of it used as well).
PC games are a whole different beast. But now that most console games are locked to an account… there’s really no benefit of them anymore. Just get a PC for your living room and install SteamOS (or similar).
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Back in the era of physical media PC games too could be bought and sold used (though only some: it really boiled down to whether it used phone-home DRM or not, something which in the PC world was all over the place).
But yeah, you were right that console games could be bought and sold used in a much more standardized way, whilst that wasn’t really a value proposition in the PC were such possibility was not at all a standard feature of PC games and it wasn’t really reliably supported in the broader ecosystem (for example, with game store not buying back used PC games as they often did for console games).
Naturally, as a unique value proposition (vs PC games) used as bait to get users inside the console walled garden in earlier days, this feature was taken away from users.
Personally I always thought that in the PC world the absence of this was balanced by games being a lot cheaper and even piracy for those for whom even so games weren’t cheap enough and in the long run, as we see, the “much cheaper” part is being way harder for PC publishers to try and undo (they’ve definitely tried of late, and IMHO it’s failing which is why AAA game publisher are bitching and moaning that their market share is falling) than the used console games market was, and the piracy part is even harder.
If there’s one think I learned early on in Tech as a professional already back in the 90s is that in the mid and long term sticking to open tech will save you from getting squeezed, both as a professional when choosing 3rd party tech stacks and as a consumer.