I also kind of think that the strongest argument for console gaming is competitive multiplayer, not single player.
The fact that the consoles are closed and locked down inherently provides resistance to cheating and such, where the open PC world tries to replicate the stuff via kernel anti-cheat stuff. The console world having (well, more-or-less) one option when it comes to hardware means that everyone playing against each other has a fairly-level playing field — same input hardware, people don’t get an edge from having fancier rendering hardware.
For single-player gaming, those console strengths become weaknesses — for single-player games, it’s preferable for the player to be able to do things like freely mod games, upgrade hardware to get fancier graphics, provide a lot of options as to what input stuff to use, etc.
If I were a console vendor and I were worried about the PC as a competing platform, I’d think that I’d try to emphasize my competitive multiplayer games, not single-player.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 19 hours ago
They keep forgetting this, Xbox thought it too. We are with our digital libraries, I’m not going to go buy a PS5 because of one game. The hardware is only the portal.