Full disclosure, I’m a PC gamer. So I’m a little biased. However I personally see more value in old consoles from 2nd to 6th generation. In the old consoles all had their own advantages. NES games were customizable, TG16 was more powerful, SNES had Mode7, Genesis was faster, PC had more input and provided a more free market to developers, PS1 was easy to develop for and so on. They had special hardware. They had different controllers and appealed to different kinds of gamers and were more convenient. It doesn’t seem like that anymore, you leave the system off for a while you boot it back up and there are gigabytes of updates, they just use off the shelf AMD cards, they all for the most part offer the same games and are getting more and more expensive. Switch is saved by it’s portability and the stellar first party line up, but same cannot be said for Series X and PS5. Playstation in particular is borderline worthless, as it’s exclusive line up can be stereotyped as “movies that make you press buttons to make sure you pay attention” it seems more logical to just watch a playthrough of them. Combine that with the fact AAA games suck across the board, it makes more sense to just build a midrange PC and play indie games in them or to buy the FPGA systems made by Analogue for example. What do you guys think?
I mean consoles have been this way for the past decade pretty much. They’re marketed to a completely different individual than the type who wants to spend the money on a PC, and generally you’ll get a better deal on a console that will run games at better specs than a comparably-priced PC. There was little reason to buy a PS4 or Xbox One at the time either, other than for the few exclusives that haven’t been ported to PC (yet?).
Moreso I think your issue is with the gaming industry at large and what sells and is pushed avidly via the console experience, which is AAA gaming. And in that respect, sure, consoles are less exciting because even if the games look better than the last gen, it doesn’t mean the games are really any more interesting. But then, barring a major crash or at least downturn of the industry it seems like it’s gonna keep staying the course on this games-as-a-service model. The people looking for a different experience clearly aren’t the ones buying consoles. For them, there is the PC, I suppose.
Bigger budgets. Risk averse. Until something trends e.g Battle Royale and then it’s all aboard.