The public: very happy to buy a box that works and plays their videogames well enough, does so in huge numbers making the model a success.

Companies: people are buying lots of our boxes and buying videogames from us. Yay.

Videogames: but why don’t I want to fuck my PlayStation as much now?

again tho, this is what you get when you treat console boxes as sports teams. If you stop doing that, you don’t need to make tables of exclusives ye olde and new.

Mind you, I find most games analysis falls apart the moment someone has to think about what money people have so there is that.

I normally get on well with Chris’s analysis but he’s got a massive blind spot on this one, I reckon.

I always need blood pressure meds wherever Dizzy is involved.

and sure, a lot of people have accumulated reasonably hefty console libraries too but unless there’s a substantial shift in access and how stores work and deal with indies etc…, Valve have gotten Steam in a position where it’s a safer bet for people being able to afford more games at some point.

Like, ignoring tech for a mo. One of the reasons I think a more considered and perfectly good enough grunt-wise for most people Steam machine is a smart move is that with people having less money and prices going up and up, a box a lot of people don’t need to buy any new games to use is A Lot.

I still haven’t entirely recovered from the “is this it? Now nobody can afford a console ever” with the PS5 and a bit. It’s going to be hell if the people who really need to drag their asses into 2025 still won’t and just wander around looking perplexed a lot.

Remember what folks were like in the run up to the switch 2?

What I’m getting at is that whenever the PS6 is going to be announced as a more slight hardware upgrade and the prices of that and the Xbox Fools Errand drop, I’m going to live in the woods with no internet.

There‘s no enormous generational leaps to come, it’s a slow grind and that doesn’t mean the console is dead, just the big new console every few years thing is never going back to the PS4 and before. And saying we need an enormous leap isn’t going to really make any odds to physics. So.

Still looks good now.

“OP is completely right, the rng sucks too. I was day one, play on the cube every single and in those six months I still haven’t even pulled anything better than some guy called Rob who just kept banging on about fish until I put the lid back on. I’m close to giving up.”

Six months into the life of the box and forum threads full of “I dunno about you guys but I kinda feel like the quality of game developers in my gabecube has really gone down lately, I opened it up last Saturday and it was the guy who made Alcatraz Harry?? what even is that???”

Imagine your joy at opening up your gabecube and you find a little Miyamoto waving back at you. You pop the lid back on and come back the next day and it’s Eugene Jarvis in there now.