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regift_of_the_gods writes:
"The results from the 2013 holiday season through January are leaking in, and they look grim: not great for Sony, bad for Microsoft, terrible for Nintendo. The PS4 seems to be outselling the Xbox One but both are far behind their respective sales totals of 2006/2007, when they faced off with the previous generation of consoles. An anonymous developer quoted in the TechCrunch piece notes: 'There are 2+ year old GPUs that outperform these boxes, and even budget GPUs releasing now in the $150 range outclass these machines... This means whilst the casuals are moving to mobile/web, the high end enthusiasts are moving to PC where games are better looking. The traditional consoles are caught in a pincer movement.'
Sony has just completed a round of layoffs at its Santa Monica game studio. Meanwhile, the future of Xbox within Microsoft remains cloudy, with the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer and the ascension of Stephen Elop as head of the Devices and Services group, which includes the Nokia/Lumia handsets and the Surface tablet as well as Xbox. There are rumors that Microsoft is negotiating to sell the Xbox division to Amazon, which seems to be trying to enter the game platform industry. Elop wrote the (in)famous 'burning platform' memo when he was CEO at Nokia, as a prelude to abandoning the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems in favor of Windows Phone; he also stated last year that he would consider divesting Xbox and Bing if he was named CEO."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cybro on Monday March 10 2014, @06:55AM
are trying to make things easier for the layperson. So as time has gone on, more and more people are adequately catered too by the PC gaming industry, which removes the impetus for console gaming at all (cheaper price, no loadhigh/IRQ/BSOD/etc hassle).
Also online games are better on the PC, and there are really high quality free games. League of Legends is very popular for example.
Not many people play local split-screen multi-player on a console anymore either.
No one uses their console to surf the web.
Why buy a PC and a console, when for less you can get a gaming pc and play better looking f2p games, and get games for super cheap on steam sales and so on?
I think that the only reason why people buy consoles now is they might not be accustomed to the idea of plugging their pc into their TV, and for the console-exclusive games (and some non exclusives that delay the PC launch such as GTA series).
So the console is really just an artificial market segmentation device at the present time, but console makers cannot hold back the tide forever.
For these reasons I predict the eventual demise of consoles.