Consoles continue their trend of just becoming worse PCs

Six years ago, PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti wrote a headline that captured the feeling of the moment, when PlayStation announced it would be bringing more of its exclusive games to Steam: Well, I guess we won the console war.

The walls between platforms had crumbled. Everything but Nintendo was or would soon be playable on PC. Steam, not Xbox Live or PSN, was the kingmaker for new indie games, and the best place for devs to keep steadily selling their back catalog.

Things feel a lot different half a decade later, as AI wreaks havoc with hardware prices, Xbox panics about all the money it’s spent on acquisitions, and Sony retreats from the PC—and physical media—back to its exclusive digital garden. And yet it still seems like the PC won the console war.

Because what are Xbox and PlayStation at this point other than PCs, but worse?

Sony’s dual announcements—that it will cease producing physical discs in 2028 and also shut down the older PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores next year—seem to have been published simultaneously with a ripping-the-band-aid-off PR mentality. People are going to be mad, so get all the bad news out at once and hope you didn’t remove too much flesh with the band-aid in the process. The takeaway of those two announcements landing simultaneously, though, is highlighting that you can only buy games on the PlayStation how and where Sony says you can. The executives have already literally said they want to wring more money out of every PlayStation owner; clearly cutting the Walmarts and GameStops of the world out of the equation is one way for them to do that.

Obviously the games industry has been trending towards digital-only releases for years; to the spreadsheet-brained it was just a matter of time until the cost of manufacturing and shipping of physical discs no longer made sense. The PC even led the charge on that front, meaning consoles clinging to the option of buying physical releases was one of their last true differentiators. Microsoft gave up on Xbox exclusivity, bringing all of its games to its own Windows Store and then to Steam. But those were just digital releases. If you really wanted to own a disc with Halo Infinite printed on it, you still needed an Xbox.

In 2020, Sony killed Microsoft’s entry level Xbox Series S, an underpowered $300 machine, by selling its discless but otherwise fully capable PS5 at just $400. In the midst of the crypto mining craze making graphics cards unobtainable, the PS5 was a great console for the price. Today it costs $250 more, and Sony has also started raising prices for its PlayStation Plus subscription service needed to play games online.

Even with the painful prices of storage and memory hitting PC gaming hard, the consoles seem to be pricing themselves into irrelevancy. In the six years since the PS5 launched, Sony has produced so few of its once-system-selling blockbuster exclusives that it’s hard to imagine spending close to $1,000 to play one new Naughty Dog game, one new Insomniac game, and a new God of War. The prestige just isn’t prestiging as hard as it was on the PS4. Add to that the uncomfortable reminder that Sony can revoke the licenses to stuff you’ve bought on its platform, and that it will inevitably stop selling old games whenever it becomes too much work to bother maintaining an aging digital store, all while you pay it $80 a year just to play games on the internet, and you’ve gotta ask what the point of that device really is.

I guess it makes a nice sound when you turn it on.

Okay, less sarcastically—the system is designed to work nicely on a TV. The user interface is relatively easy to navigate. It’s got apps. Those old chestnuts have been used to defend consoles against the scawwy computer for as long as I can remember. It was true in, like, 2004. But console interfaces get more annoying and ad-infested every year, while their games now offer multiple performance options to pick from in a shallow approximation of the PC experience. Valve’s SteamOS, meanwhile, has made tremendous strides towards a controller-friendly interface without sacrificing the flexibility that has always been the PC’s core identity.

Install SteamOS on a giant tower PC or a tiny box built from the guts of a PS5! Use whatever controller you want! Buy your games on Steam (the prices are always better) or get them DRM-free on GOG, or grab them from a legally questionable “abandonware” website if they’re no longer on sale. Still have a soft spot for physical discs (or disks) and want to do everything on the up-and-up? A USB drive will cost you all of 20 bucks, and decades of PC games remain available on Ebay. There are probably even cool mods or fan projects that make them play nice with modern hardware.

The PC may have led the charge on digital games years ago, but the thing is: anyone can still make, sell, or play physical PC games if they want to. The only person who can take away your PC disc drive is you.

To sum it all up:

• The last PlayStation and Xbox that were meaningfully different from PCs under the hood came out in 2005 and 2006.
• Price was once their biggest asset—AI has killed that.
• Simplicity was their second biggest, but while they’ve been making that experience worse for years, Valve (and the open source developers behind great initiatives like Bazzite) have been making the PC’s better.
• Genuinely compelling exclusives other than Nintendo’s are anomalies, and it’s hard to be heartbroken over missing one or two given the number of interesting games hitting Steam every single week.

Sony now sells an overpriced entry ticket to a walled garden that kinda looks worse than the forest just outside it, while Xbox is actively lighting its own grounds on fire. Simpler and cheaper used to be worth the price of admission for a lot of people. But the way things are going, by the time the PS6 arrives anyone who buys it will just be paying more for worse.