| >Is there a mature discussion on the history of 'consolization' anywhere online The console market is huge as not everyone is tech savvy enough to maintain a gaming PC and bother with all the OS updates, driver updates, patches, HW upgrades and such. Lots of people just want to hop on the couch after school/work, pick up the controller and start playing. And since the console market is so big, it made financial sense for the game studios to use them as the lowest common denominator during development. More sales on more platforms = more $$$, despite the PC ports ending up sub-par. The dark ages ware during the PS3 and Xbox 360 days since those consoles used custom CPU/GPU architectures, radically different than PCs, which coupled with the low quality of the SW tooling and SDKs of the era made cross-platform game development a nightmare at the time so more often than not games made for both console and PCs turned out janky AF. But thankfully, since the last couple of console generations are basically x64 AMD APU powered PCs, and SW tooling is way simpler and more efficient and of higher quality so game devs can scale their engines and visuals much easier between console and PC reducing the quality discriminations. However, I have noticed that console gaming experience has gotten a lot more janky in the last few generations as their HW and SW have reached PC levels of complexity, with long waiting times, errors and crashes being more common than in the days of ROM cartridges. The new and powerful SSD-only, generation of consoles seem to reverse that trend though and bring back a snappy and more responsive UX. Although I gave up on modern gaming for the most part, especially the over-hyped AAA titles, the progress on the tech side pleases me (baring the chip shortage scalpocalypse we live in) |