Game consoles are doing better than ever | Hacker News Reader

Game consoles are doing better than ever

arstechnica.com

72 pointsjoeyespo65 comments

For me it was the comfort factor. I used to be a PC gamer after I grew out of PSX in the early 2000s...but lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on. I found gaming on the console to be a good context switch to relax and in the comfort of a living room on a sofa vs. hunched over keyboard and mouse.

FPS games were weird at first to play on a ps3/ps4 controller but I found other constraints helpful such as the lack of text chat which let me just focus on the game.

Overall I enjoy the simplification from getting into a match, not have to worry about hardware upgrades (its okay to not have the ultimate graphics), not having to argue in text chats etc...all from the comfort of a couch

> lately I just got tired of sitting in front of the same screen I do my work on

Living room PCs are also a thing. Boot directly into Steam, with a Steam Controller to play mouse games with the gamepad, and it's mostly a fine experience, and it gets better every year. Added bonus, you can run games at much better framerates and resolution than a console ever could. And "upgrading" is not needed that often. I have a 3 years old card that is still running most games at high details, even recent ones.

You do still run into the same problem that using a controller on a mobile device has: when you're using a minority input device, many games are not designed for you. The top-selling PC games are not best experienced with controller, even a Steam Controller. You can very easily find yourself buying a game that claims controller support yet really does need a keyboard and mouse.

With a console, you know every single game on the system is made for your exact use case. And I say this as a mostly PC gamer with an Xbox controller plugged into his PC.

This is a very dated point of view. Look at the top 2017 PC games from Metacritic [1]. Almost all of these were designed for a controller because they are console ports. And in terms of hardware support the Xbox controller is the de-facto controller on PC, the drivers ship with Windows and it has a massive install base. Steam controller is a failed gimmick.

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/year/...

Thinking that PC games are limited to the top releases on Metacritic is ignoring literally all the value PCs bring to gaming. There is a massive long tail of games that aren't on that list but are very popular PC games nonetheless.

If I played with a controller exclusively, I'd have to give up Cities: Skylines. I'd have to give up Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. I'd have to give up Civilization. I'd have to give up Factorio. I'd have to give up Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. There's no way I'd be able to map all of the controls of BeamNG Drive or Euro Truck Simulator to an Xbox controller.

That's a lot of sacrifices being made. After all that, what's the point in having a gaming PC anymore? And that's not counting that eventually you'll have to plug in a mouse and keyboard to do Windows Updates or something else that the OS will make you do that isn't controller compatible. Might as well just keep them plugged in, no?

You are ignoring the context of the discussion, which is to compare PCs to consoles in a living room. The gp comment explicitly said he gave up PC gaming as he did not want to play at a desk. And my point is that PC gaming is so damn good that even if you ignore a bunch of amazing games by limiting yourself to a controller you are still left with a huge library of games that are generally cheaper to buy and run best on PC, especially as they age.

Yes, the out-of-game UX is worse on PC. Steam makes it easy with Big Picture Mode but other clients do not, and sometimes Windows needs babysitting. You can get a small wireless mouse & keyboard or a combo like this [1]. I use an app [2] that lets me use my phone as a touch pad and a keyboard. It also lets you minimize & switch between windows & shut down the PC. When you install a new game client configure it to remember your password. When you install a game put a link for it on the desktop. The core flow is pretty good but yeah sometimes there will be pop-ups to update drivers or install updates or something else. I still think that the major performance and price benefits offered by PCs are well worth it. I am also not a fan of modern console UIs which are increasingly show more ads.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014EUQOGK

[2] http://www.remotemouse.net/

You can avoid that risk by buyIng games that are clearly labelled as controller supported in Steam. As in, the keyboard is never required. For games where you would typically require a keyboard the Steam controller's flexible mapping tool makes it easy to map many keys on the controller. I can even play keyboard intensive games like warhammer40k DoW3 with it.

And the Pc world is all about choice. I can decide to grab a Dual Shock 4 or Xbox360 controller instead of my Steam Controller and it will work just as well. You just cannot expect any kind of flexibility on consoles: they are built to be disposed off a few years down the road.

>>> And the Pc world is all about choice. I can decide to grab a Dual Shock 4 or Xbox360 controller instead of my Steam Controller and it will work just as well.

If I have learned anything in decades of PC gaming, it's that the controller never worked properly.

Yes, but that's partly because of badly programmed games as well. Some games assume you will use a Xbox360 controller and nothing else and therefore make it hard for you to use anything else. Steam with their new Steam Controller API makes it easy to simulate a Xinput controller with about any controller out there.

The fixed platform is the winner for consoles though. Just playing Dark Souls 3 on my pc, played the first two on the consoles. I have to run an xbox controller emulator because it only supports the xbox pad, and I have a ps4 pad. You just don't get this stuff in console land.

> You just don't get this stuff in console land.

On a PS4 it's just impossible to use a Xbox360 pad or vice versa on an Xbox. Being able to use ANY pad is great on PC, even if you need one or two extra steps. At least the possibility is there.

Funny thing, for me I use my console on my Monitor because (like many people my age) don't have a need for a good TV so I still have a rubbish 720p TV.

I do however, often play the console because its non-distractable.

When I'm on my PC I get notification after notification, steam messages, my brain wanting to randomly browse, load up spotify or youtube etc etc.

When I chuck my switch on the monitor, there are no distractions, its just me and the game.

I still prefer PC gaming, but the console is almost a more "pure" experience due to the way my brain is wired to use the PC now, its a bit worrying really.

I used to have seperate accounts on my Windows installation for work, gaming, & casual browsing - all of which have very different themes and even applications (making sure I use an alternate browser to casual browsing is essential)... I took this to the extreme and now use a plain Antergos+i3 config for work, Solus for casual browsing/linux-friendly games, and Windows for the MS-only stuff.

I'm a big advocate of clear partitions and interruptive practices for people who get soup-brain while using their PC. Since the worst form of that is straight-up, destructive, addiction.

For me, playing mobile games is essentially like playing Slot machines. Its this reason i don't let me kids play games on their mobile device.

It makes more sense just buying a Switch, which allows more interactive play with people, more coop and time limits without the feeling their is a slot machine effect happening

Thats a very broad statement, there are a lot of great mobile games that aren't slot machines - even some from Nintendo. Mario Run, Threes, Alto's Adventure, SPL-T, Reigns, Leap Day - phew, and thats off the top of my head; there's a lot of choice on the App Store.

The real problem is that the App Store provides no search filters of any kind and nearly-useless browsing. If you could simply say “show me only games with no slot machines”, the experience would be so much better.

While I loved Alto's Adventure (and some more of those), and it was by no means aggregious, it does include things like watching ads to continue your run (at least once), and other microtransactions.

I don't think I'm a reactionary, and this is a problem on consoles and PC as well, but there is a lot of difference between mobile games and games where you buy an entire experience and everything relevant is designed into that system. Nothing is gated, you can make it easier through a difficulty setting, you can't make it easier by paying extra dollars.

Note that I avoid anything last 5 years EA and similar that can't for the life of them design games that respect their customers.

Spacechem was the best game I've ever played on an iPad, it suited the form factor perfectly. It's a real shame Zactronics dropped support for iOS [0]. FTL also works well and the touch controls are reminiscent of Star Trek's.

There's some real gems in the mobile space and more and more real games are migrating over. Nintendo of course have stomped all over the entire industry with some exceptional hardware and games this past year.

[0] https://twitter.com/zachtronics/status/658428388432982016

I think people predicted the crash of console gaming because they expected mobile gaming to eclipse it.

What realistically happened was the forging of a new market, which will not stop folks from buying a console for a solid, reliable piece of dedicated gaming hardware.

I do game on my mobile devices, but only non gamers can think that they had any chance against game consoles.

Indies are learning the hard way how the crash of 1983 came to be.

Yes, there are lots of junk games in consoles, after going through the certification process that Nintendo brought to the industry as recovery from the crash, which means even worse ones did not managed to be certified.

Mobile app stores don't have any bar to meet, beyond a quite basic set of checkpoints by console gaming standards, so finding good quality games is quite hard and worse given the race to bottom, most studios don't get to pay the overall development efforts.

The media didn't really talk to gamers.

Looking back its clear the media really bought into the "everything is going to be smartphones" and "Apple is going to kill Sony, Microsoft, Google and God by the grace of Steve Jobs". Nowadays its ofcourse Amazon that they can't shut up about.

Basically predictions suck and we all laugh about them a few years later.

I don't think it's hardware at all. I think it's quality of the games. The vast majority of mobile games are all the same type we've seen since they first crept-up on Facebook a decade ago: Farmville-clones, Tower Defense or Endless Runners with an all-encompassing focus on cash shops and in-game advertising.

Console and PC gaming (with the obvious exception of certain conglomerates) tend to be focused on a gaming experience that isn't just a monetization treadmill.

They're also focused on an entirely different use case: a console is for playing games possibly hours at a time. Mobile games are designed for playing in chunks measured in minutes.

Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the only people that thought phone games would replace console/PC "real" games were people that aren't gamers.

Completely agree. This was part of my point not well laid out.

I think they expected console vendors to do what they did for decades before that: design custom chips.

Designing a good CPU/SoC became so much expensive that no single console vendor can do good enough.

Fortunately for them, Sony/Nintendo/MS stopped designing custom processors for their consoles, and instead adopted hardware designed by AMD, nVidia and ARM.

I was one of those people who thought as much, couldn't predict it.

Mobile gaming is all about gamification. To keep you playing through tricks so you can watch ads or spend more buying game items.

Console gaming is all about game play.

I believe most multiplayer games have learned the art of gambling mechanics at this point, at least partly as a result of its extreme success in the mobile market. Randomized item/skin unlocks, short-exp leveling, etc.

And of course, dlc add-ons has just been getting bigger each year.

AAA's are getting worse about "gamification", and I think its going to continue. Mobile didnt take over, but its successes won't be so simply forgotten

Consoles provide experiences that mobile games can't.

That said, mobile has eclipsed consoles. 11% growth to $3.3 billion in the US. But by way of contrast, Pokemon Go hit a billion in revenue by itself last February.

TBH everything is thriving. Mobile games, PC (Steam), even board games are having a renaissance. A geekier, more tech-oriented generation is growing up, and the market is expanding in every direction.

Just like the article says in the very beginning: in 2011-2012, when Zynga was "the next big thing" and the ps3/x360 successors have not been revealed yet, every ( * ) article about the games industry was essentially about how the consoles came to the end, mobile and social games destroyed them and even if there is going to be a next generation of consoles - it's going to be definitely the last one.

( * ) it's an exaggeration, there probably were some other articles somewhere but the vast majority was about the decline of console business.

This makes me wonder if the increasing costs of GPUs due to crypto mining has led some consumers to purchase a console when they would have otherwise bought a PC.

I reckon most people choose PC or console (or both) based on 1) what their friends have 2) what games they like to play 3) backward compatability with existing games and 3) how much they value the convenience of consoles.

I mean, surely it's not affecting the sort of GPU which would go into most computers? I think it's only quite a small proportion of people who'd spend more than a couple of hundred quid because they have a massive screen or want to turn everything up to ultra.

I seem to be able to play quite a lot of modern games acceptably at 1080p on my work laptop which an Intel integrated graphics thingy, for example.

For "a couple hundred quid", especially when you want to save on a free-sync display, the RX 570 and RX 580's are right in that price range. If sold at MSRP. But now these 170-250usd cards cost 2-3 times as much. I hear its a similar situation now with mid-range nvidia cards.

This.

I have a huge Steam library and many PC gamer friends. Also, I'm into indie games.

Besides the PSX, I never had a console.

You can still get a video card that can play 90% of current games at max settings for around $200-$250, same as 10 years ago. But the upper end does seem to have expanded and become more expensive.

Whether a game can run smoothly on max settings is heavily resolution dependent; the difference in GPU power required to run a game at 1080p vs 1440p is quite substantial.

Try finding a 1060 6gb, 1070 or a 580 in stock at anywhere near MSRP.

I stand corrected. I've been buying a new video card every 2-4 years for 20+ years and I have never seen these kind of markups or out of stock items.

Everyone and their aunt are buying them for the last couple of months out of the crypto craze, for mining. Whether it's worth it I don't know, but it's annoying for the rest of us who want to get one.

I bought a 1070 almost exactly a year ago for $460 from Amazon - now I see its not sold by Amazon anymore and the few resellers have it priced at $1100. Evga themselves have it at $540 with a limit of 1 per customer.

I'd argue that the future of games consoles is still in jeapordy, but the doom and gloom arguments of 2012 were premature.

The Nintendo switch is a perfect conceptual example of what the smartphone could turn into, in terms of gaming. It all runs on mobile hardware, with Nvidia Tegra powering the graphics.

What's to stop Apple or other companies supporting slot in controllers on the side of the phones? I think it's inevitable that companies take influence from the switch.

Once we have 'switches' using the iPhone or Samsung galaxies, etc, I think there's no turning back. Then you can just cast that video feed to the TV a la Switch dock, just over wireless connection.

Of course it will take a while to build up the infrastructure for it, but this idea seems obvious.

But then you can't use your phone when you're gaming, makes no sense, and you're on a weaker system. Why would anyone do that? The next big thing is already near, it's what Microsoft and Apple will both be doing soon. Bringing their primary system gaming into the living room, using Apple TV or Xbox. The Windows store and App store will both be doing this soon. Microsoft has a head start, but Apple will jump into it soon enough.

The reason people are buying gaming consoles is because it fixes two problems at once and it costs the same, if not cheaper, than an AppleTV. You can stream all of your services and TV...and you can game. Closing the platform gap is the next big thing, not the Switch model. The Switch is cool, but as a standalone product, making that a phone is just nonsense. The phone is a gaming companion for more powerful devices, and it coexists in the gaming spectrum as a time passer.

Your phone is a phone. You could game on it, but I don’t see hardcore console gamers using it as their primary console for tv gaming. Better to have a dedicated device with it’s own storage and environment built for games.

Whats to stop Nintendo from copying from other companies? Because that's what they did.

Content is King. Nintendo made better hardware and people flocked to it but the content was always there.

The Switch wins because of the games behind it. Even with a nice dock that's never coming to a phone because those companies don't get games.

I'd also argue the Switch isn't really a console It's a mobile that can dock (and Nintendo has dominated mobile gaming for 20+ years, so that's not new). It's really underpowered. Playing BotW on a TV at 920p 30 frames is ok, but it's still way below the other real consoles, which can push pusedo-4k. That's really impressive, and may account for some of their popularity. Both the Xbox and PS4 have been really solid systems without lots of the flaws of their predecessors.

> The Switch wins because of the games behind it.

You could have said the same thing for the WiiU (while not a fully portable console per se): It had a few excellent games, but nobody wanted it. It's not as simple as that.

The Switch's success is helped by its predecessor's failure, not unlike Windows 7 was helped by poor reception of Vista.

Plenty of people skipped on the Wii U, but demand for Nintendo's content remained high. People wanted to play BotW and Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 despite not wanting to commit to a dead-end console, so Nintendo gave them BotW, Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch, and dropped hints [1][2] that more are forthcoming.

The Switch refines and realizes the vision of the Wii U and allows gamers who love Nintendo's content to experience some of the best chunks of what they missed, with the promise that more exciting content is on the horizon. The Switch largely sold because people still want to believe in Nintendo, and they think they executed successfully this time around.

[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/06/15/e3-2017-bringing-more... [2] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-more-s...

People were not ready to give up the wii and wii u was so different. I just played a wii game an hour ago.

The thing is the Switch has already proven to be a winner and it's mainly because of the content on it.

The Wii U wasn't a mobile at all, though The tablet was tied to the console.

Yes but how much does the Switch gets used outside vs inside? In Japan even though it is doing well I have never seen any kid playing with a Switch outside, while 3DS can be seen everywhere.

If Japan isn't doing it, then I am guessing Americans don't either. You barely see 3DSs outside anymore. Personally I don't bring my Switch outside because it cost a lot of money, while my 3DS was $100 used.

Kind of a weird attitude, since my phone is just as expensive if not more, but it feels unsafe to take the Switch out for my commute.

Yeah. In Japan its not a safety issue, so I am not sure why they dont carry it around. Maybe because they already have a smartphone anyway and dont want to carry tons of devices around?

Anyway this kind of defeats the purpose of having a portable console format for the Switch if it is not used in this way.

your analysis is of the game console as a piece of hardware. similarly, why pay for hbo when i've got youtube? because hbo has the good shit; youtube has mostly just shit.

I'd love to see Apple create a console with their custom A chips.

They could easily outperform the switch if they wanted to go to that form factor. Otherwise, I still think they could put out a great console with the help of one of the graphic card companies.

The issue would be content. Since the other consoles are more like desktops, creators would need to make sure that the games worked on ARM as well.

Doubt this will ever happen but it would be pretty cool.

They've done it and called it Apple TV: https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/specs/

Seriously, they're even selling a proper game controller for it: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HL4P2/steelseries-nimbus-...

> What's to stop Apple or other companies supporting slot in controllers on the side of the phones?

If it would make the phone 0.1mm thicker, Apple will not do it.

There doesn't need to be a hardware change, and companies are already offering such devices. Even in Apple's own online store: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HKPB2VC/A/gamevice-contro...

Hardware is first pillar content is the second. Why would I buy the first if the second doesn't exist?

I mean, it certainly helps that the mobile market is plagued with freemium scum, and the current obsession with GPU-mined cryptocurrencies has greatly reduced the value proposal for a new rig if you don't want to mess with that with PCs. Under those lenses, then yes, a console suddenly looks quite attractive as a cheaper, more curated option.

If you want to hurt those guys- buy a click farm audience and set them loose on a game. The moment theire add-customers realize what part of the "userbase" is- its GONE, what a nice woody sort of word.

A friend of mine bought a MAME cabinet about ten years back. I've replace a couple pieces on it here and there, hard drive, monitor, but it's still pretty much the same as is was back then.

We might play it twice a week, but nothing beats drinking a couple games and battling it out in some classic games.

Dont forget xbox live is a million times better than anything pc has

Just wait until somebody builds some easy to deploy Linux distro called PS4MinerOS. Does anybody know how cost effective the hardware in modern consoles would be for crypto mining?

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