From developers’ perspective, platforms are an obstacle. PC is the least-onerous middleman between them and customers. (And Steam still takes an entire third of their revenue.) The push for games to just work on whatever, for everyone, was already present by the PS2 era, and by the PS3 era it nearly killed the PS3. Sony’s wacky-but-powerful hardware counted for fuck-all to devs who wanted a PC release and and Xbox port or vice-versa. Sony only recovered by providing a generic API and getting some games that worked basically how they worked on every other machine.
Everything is a computer now. The PS5 and Xbox whateveritscalled are nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo’s money-printing handheld is an Android tablet by Nvidia. There is no special sauce anymore. Microsoft is fully prepared for this, since the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market, but Sony is struggling to recognize the war is over. Helldivers showed them how much money they could make being just a PC publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. They’re not okay. Their entire business model is rooted in being a platform, when consumers are sick and tired of dealing with platforms.
From developers’ perspective, platforms are an obstacle. PC is the least-onerous middleman between them and customers. (And Steam still takes an entire third of their revenue.) The push for games to just work on whatever, for everyone, was already present by the PS2 era, and by the PS3 era it nearly killed the PS3. Sony’s wacky-but-powerful hardware counted for fuck-all to devs who wanted a PC release and and Xbox port or vice-versa. Sony only recovered by providing a generic API and getting some games that worked basically how they worked on every other machine.
Everything is a computer now. The PS5 and Xbox whateveritscalled are nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo’s money-printing handheld is an Android tablet by Nvidia. There is no special sauce anymore. Microsoft is fully prepared for this, since the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market, but Sony is struggling to recognize the war is over. Helldivers showed them how much money they could make being just a PC publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. They’re not okay. Their entire business model is rooted in being a platform, when consumers are sick and tired of dealing with platforms.
We just want to game.