There are fewer and fewer reasons as time goes on, but the big one is that it’s usually a lower up-front cost (in a lot of cases, still is) and just works without any fuss. We might find the fuss on PC to be pretty minimal, but on console, it approaches 0. PCs have gotten easier to work with, people have become more literate in how to use them, and the long-term savings on PC with a significantly sized library have become more apparent, but there will always still be a market for something like a console, even if that means they abandon some of their defining traits in order to survive the future.
Comment on Confirmed: PS5 console prices are being raised by $100 | VGC
CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Why do people buy a console instead of a PC? I just can’t understand, seriously.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
lemmyng@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can’t be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Mat Piscatella makes a good argument that they haven’t proven that. A lot of Xbox titles became all-time PS5 best-sellers immediately after getting ported. People who wanted to play those games could have bought an Xbox at any point to play them before the multiplatform strategy was announced, but they didn’t. He would argue that people have already settled into their platform of choice and just wait for the games they want to come there. Something like a third of all console players (at least Xbox/PS) are only playing multiplatform live service games on those consoles, not any of the marquis exclusives.
And to be honest, that makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t even that many exclusives anymore, compared to the deluge that there might have been in the 5th/6th gens.
PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This is a good point, but leaves Nintendo out of the consideration
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And I don’t have data for this, because I’m not an analyst, and Piscatella shares what he shares, so all I’ve got are anecdotal observations.
Speaking for myself, even if I wasn’t pissed off at how Nintendo operates as a company and decided not to be a customer of theirs anymore, they’re still running into the same problems that caused me to lose interest in PlayStation. They can’t put out enough exclusives to justify a $500 machine to play them, since I’m going to be playing everything else, at better settings, for the same or lower price, on PC.