I feel like the better thing to compete on is “plug it in and it works”, “easier to play on your couch and TV with a controller than a PC” and various comparisons to the other consoles.
Other than setup and ease of couch gaming, PC has them beat hands down. And it’s only very slightly easier in those dimensions too.
Which on the other hand is something many PC gamers and content with. Steam consoles didn’t sell well because the market for PC fixed consoles wasn’t there.
Yup. It’s why they’re unlikely to get conversions, but they might get people to do both.
Consoles compete with PC gaming, but they’re not substitutes. The best they can hope for is people who are relatively indifferent to the advantages a PC has being persuaded by the console advantages, or people who are okay with just having both picking a PS5 over an Xbox or Nintendo.
For the latter, I think they’d be better served looking for a way to do “but it in one, play it in both” type deals, since that makes the ambivalent people more likely to default to PlayStation, since they still get PC, and the “both” people are more likely to buy sooner, since waiting doesn’t get them anything.
There are at least tens of thousands of games to play on the PC. They must expect FOMO to be a huge motivator but I don’t think it’s going to have much of an effect.
They’re going to be waiting for a long, long time then.
Get your shit on steam and stop making that stupid PSN network that leaked my information that I’m still dealing with to this day a requirement to play your first party games.
I still haven’t played Cyberpunk yet, which seems like it’s aimed directly at me and I really want to play, just because it hasn’t been cheap enough on the Steam sales yet. I think they might be slightly underestimating the patience of PC gamers lol.
The Steam Deck did that, and I would happily buy a Sony handheld or something if it offered value.
But no, they instead want me to buy a locked down system that competes with my existing PC, and their sales pitch is, “buy this or you can’t play these games.” I don’t respond well to threats of FOMO, so I’m not going to buy it. I own a Switch and a Steam Deck because they provide value I can’t get elsewhere, I don’t own a Playstation or an Xbox because they don’t.
When so much is multi-player now, the cross platform stuff sucks on console. Average PC players are gods compared to using a regular controller on console.
If it helps, I mostly got it so I could play fun couch co-op games w/ my kids. We’ve taken it camping, on road trips, etc, and it’s honestly quite good for that.
Yes, Nintendo is anti-consumer and way worse in that regard, but they really deliver on the “new ways to play” angle. I just can’t get anything like the local multiplayer experience I get with Nintendo elsewhere, and that’s true for almost all of their history:
NES - awesome accessories, like the DuckHunt gun, running pad, etc
N64 - local multiplayer games were fantastic, and the controller was interesting
Wii - controller made for a very fun casual multiplayer experience
Switch - very portable and the joycons are very easy to pass around
And their handhelds were all the best on the market:
gameboy - first and had fantastic battery life, the gameboy color was immensely popular; no competition whatsoever
gba - way better gameplay experience vs gameboy, Sega Game Gear had terrible battery life, huge back catalogue with gb compat, so upgrading was a no-brainer
Nintendo DS - PSP had better hardware, DS had better battery life, better load times, and just better portability all around; 3DS improved on this
Nintendo has continually delivered an interesting gaming experience with almost each generation. That’s why they appeal to people despite the anti-consumer behavior they have, and that’s why I buy their systems.
Valve gets most of my gaming money because they win the rest of my priorities, but Nintendo gets some too. PS5 and Xbox compete in all the ways I don’t care about, Nintendo and Steam compete in the ways I do.
i’ve never been a big Nintendo fan, i got the Wii and the Nintendo DS as a child but that’s all. I don’t understand the reason to buy a switch when a Steam Deck can do exactly the same and much more imo, But i got your point.
But it can’t. Can you remove the controllers and play with a friend? Can you slip it in a bag, just in case? Can you play on an airplane or road trip without worrying about battery life?
The Steam Deck is fantastic for single player gaming, which is why I have it. But battery life isn’t great for portability (road trips or flights), and for multiplayer, you basically need to hook it up to a TV and have more controllers.
I don’t see much point in a Switch Lite except to reuse games from another Switch you have.
Depend if you’re apart pc or console team at first, as a pc user why would i buy a console that only let me play the games of the manufacturer with a obsolete hardware while i could do the same + any games running on pc with the other one ?
I play Switch games on Switch, and PC games on Steam Deck. Switch, for me, is casual gaming with my kids or friends. PC, for me, is more intense gaming alone or with friends online.
Can you play something like Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, or Mario Party with someone on an airplane or in a car with a PC? If you’re playing games with friends visiting, can you easily hand off a controller every round and expect the next player to have fun?
Couch co-op kinda sucks on PC generally. Xbox was cool with the Kinect, but they killed that so I’m back to Nintendo. Nintendo just offers a fantastic casual gaming experience.
I have Switch because it’s a lot of fun with my wife and kids. I have Steam Deck because I like playing games in bed. I have a gaming PC for more intense games. I don’t have Xbox or PS because they aren’t better in any way imo.
Opening their platform has become a more major consideration for me sense the Steam Deck, I didn’t think it would be possible in a console like form before, but the Deck has caused me to raise me standards
(Not that I was ever the biggest console gamer before either…)
Yeah, I bought it because it was an interesting form factor, not too expensive, and I could repurpose it if I ended up not liking the Steam experience. I honestly play 99% Steam games, so I’m liking it a lot.
I don’t buy most consoles (except Switch) because they’re not interesting form factors, games are generally a lot more expensive, and it’ll just become ewaste.
If Sony made a good, standalone handheld, I might get it. If Microsoft continued the Kinect, I might get an Xbox (I had the 360 for Kinect in the past). But no, neither is compelling, so I don’t buy them.
You’re probably in the minority. There’s 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that’s over 3,000 PS5’s for every subscribed account here.
A lot of users here have PC’s that approach or exceed the PS5’s capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don’t. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.
Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It’s still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC’s less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.
Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It’s great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony’s PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it’s been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.
They’ve been doing this strategy for a few years now, and Sony isn’t seeing PS5 grow the way they need it to, and that’s in an environment where they’re so dominant that their competition has thrown in the towel. PC overtook any one console some years ago, and due to how long it takes Sony to make them now, they don’t have the volume of unique exclusives to entice people to buy the console like they used to. This strategy isn’t working, and they will pivot. They just need to say, for now, that they’re not going to.
What makes you think the PS5 isn’t growing how they need it to? It’s outselling the Xbox and it isn’t close. In a less direct comparison, it’s outselling the Switch. It’s outselling what the PS4 did, and that was successful. I don’t understand where this sentiment that the PS5 is struggling is coming from. The second half of your first sentence even mentions that they’re really dominant right now.
I also don’t understand “PC overtaking any one console”… Like, how is that even a comparison? When was the last time there were more consoles than consumer PC’s… The SNES era? I’m not even sure about that, you might need to go further back.
Even if you want to talk about just gaming, that’s tricky to even start to compare. The closest I can think of is that according to this Steam averaged 120 million monthly users last year. According to this, PSN averaged 118 million monthly users in Q4 2023. That’s pretty much dead even. I don’t think it makes sense to add other platforms to the PC side without adding in Nintendo and Xbox to the console side, in which case… Consoles have more users and it’s not close. And they both are just a fraction of the mobile gaming market anyways.
Sony has absolutely proven that they can generate the unique exclusives that sell consoles. That’s… Why they have the best-selling console right now. Their strategy is working. You could say this about plenty of other consoles at points in the past (PS3, WiiU, 3DS, GameCube, N64, Xbox One). If you even said this a couple years ago about Sony struggling to manufacture PS5’s fast enough that might make sense. But they’re currently dominating the home console market. So I don’t understand why you think they’re struggling or need to drastically change the way they do things?
Just to clarify- what strategy are you predicting that they will change?
What makes me think that the PS5 isn’t growing how they need to is because they’ve admitted it with their words and actions. Their margins are thinner, they’re not moving as many consoles as they’d expect to at this point in the generation, and they felt the need at all to put their games on PC when they never did before. “Struggling” is the wrong word, but the console business model as it’s existed for decades no longer works like it once did.
I’m not talking about number of PCs compared to number of consoles. I’m saying the same game sells more on PC now when it used to sell way more on consoles. Maybe there are a few stragglers that still do better on consoles, but they’re rare now. Your number of active users for PSN includes PS3 and PS4 users. I’m included in those PS4 users, and my PlayStation only plays Hulu these days.
The strategy I’m predicting they’ll change, despite this PR statement is that PC releases will come out closer to the console version than they do now, and they’d be crazy to do anything else in the wake of Helldivers. Temporary management in the wake of Jim Ryan even said they were going to do this.
Jokes on them, I rarely buy a game at release anyway. An extra year of console players beta-testing the game just means I am more likely to know a game is a dud that much sooner.
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