Ex-PlayStation exec argues ‘only the dog can hear’ differences between consoles and gaming PCs: ‘They’re all quite similar’

As we tend to brag from time to time, it’s becoming more and more evident that the winner of the console wars isn’t a console at all—but the humble personal computer. We’re totally not biased in this opinion given the name of our website, and I don’t appreciate the insinuation.

In all seriousness, there is some truth to it. Console exclusives keep coming to PC, their sales are down, and the conveniences of couch play are no longer the domain of the console alone. Even Nintendo, everlasting bastion of the console exclusive, is struggling to market its Switch 2 in a way that doesn’t make it look like a Steam deck with fewer games.

It doesn’t help that there are tons of quality of life bumps on a PC, too—as our own Fraser Brown astutely noted last year, being able to stream your PC to a TV, or take it on walkabouts with a Steam Deck makes it functionally very similar. The death knell of the console wars is finally starting to ring.

Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden, speaking to podcast PlayerDriven, did some wondering out loud on the subject, and he thinks that the console war’s triumvirate of manufacturers is something that needs to go, full stop:

“Ultimately, I would like the games industry to have the same penetration rate as television sets do.” Penetration rate is just fancy exec talk for ‘what proportion of the population has this thing’. For example, most households in the UK have a kettle. Because we like our tea very much. “So how do you get there? One thing, I don’t think you get there by having only three manufacturers.”

It’s here Layden loses me just a little. He proposes something “along the lines of the ‘game’ format … We’d get a pretty good game format OS—if the players could agree to come together—and then licence that out. Just like we do with Blu-ray, just like we do with the compact disk—and let people compete on content.”

Layden posits that “The architecture in the current version of [consoles] and of high-end PCs are quite close now, they’re all quite similar. And any changes or any enhancements to that—like we like to say in the studios, ‘only the dog can hear that’. Like, ‘we’re gonna have 20% more ray tracing’. Okay?”

Not to push up my glasses and have a very snooty chuckle, but any PC I’d describe as high-end routinely pushes even current-gen consoles into a locker and takes their lunch money. But that’s also an uncharitable read on what I think Layden’s actually getting here.

Sure, you can grab an absolute terror for a couple thousand dollars—way more expensive than a console would run you—but Layden is right in that only graphically-minded freaks like our hardworking hardware team are going to be able to notice the difference. If you’re aiming for the same ubiquity of a kettle, TV, or fridge? The vast majority of people won’t see much change between a mid-range gaming PC and a console.

This, Layden prophesies, is what’s needed to “take gaming from not just being the most financially lucrative entertainment in the world … but make it also the most socially impactful entertainment in the world.”

The issue is—and to Layden’s credit, he’s talking about a pie-in-the-sky scenario—game engines are a heck of a lot more complicated than CDs. Tuning for performance is a nightmare, and while upscaling tech is downright impressive, it’s far from being able to let you run a current-gen game well on lower-end hardware.

In an ecosystem where visual fidelity is a huge selling point, as long as you can conceivably push for “20% more ray-tracing”, people are gonna want that. Even if the senses required to notice it are an acquired taste. Not to mention, AI, which could be used to further technological equity between rigs, is mostly just being used to make games even more ultrareal. I don’t see a Blu-ray-style future for PC gaming any time soon.