Yeah but PC gamers are a different breed, and typically know what they're doing way more than the console market (generally speaking)..
Consoles are more of a known quantity, and "Sony", "Microsoft" or "Nintendo" on the hardware box represents a seal of quality (up to a point), both with the hardware and the software that will run on it.
This gives uninformed buyers (i.e. grandma - just to stick with a known stereotype) confidence that they're not buying something awful for their grandchild.
Before the pedants jump in, I know this is an over-simplification and there are bad games on consoles, yes yes..
But that's the general idea.. It's like the Apple App Store (minus the sheer volume of available software), it's a walled garden so there's an implied level of review and quality that is supposed to give consumers some confidence about the products, both hardware and software.
Also, less now than before, hardware manufacturers don't make money on the machines, they make money on the licensing for the software.
Console makers aren't interested in making devices that sell at super thin margins and provide zero incremental revenue because they get bought by a homebrew crowd that won't buy into the ecosystem.
In the "old days", there used to be a big genre separation between PC and consoles. Prior to consoles being powerful enough to drive FPS games, they were generally the best way to play arcade ports, Japanese RPGs and communal multiplayer games.
The lines started to really blur (imo) with the Xbox 360, when people really started playing FPS on TVs in very big numbers.
On the other hand, the types of games that kept me buying consoles (fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken) are now released day and date with consoles. Thanks to the availability of these games and high frequency of huge discounts on Steam, I no longer foresee any reason for myself to ever buy a new console in the future.
Consoles are still great for fans of certain franchises and genres (like Zelda, Mario Kart and Rock Band) that don't make it to PCs, but for everyone else, I'm not so sure.
Even if console gamers are a different breed, I feel like the homebrew crowd is even more different from console gamers than console gamers are from pc gamers.
>Console makers aren't interested in making devices that sell at super thin margins and provide zero incremental revenue because they get bought by a homebrew crowd that won't buy into the ecosystem.
But are they really a threat, and are they a big enough threat to be worth spending the time and money to lock out?
Consoles are more of a known quantity, and "Sony", "Microsoft" or "Nintendo" on the hardware box represents a seal of quality (up to a point), both with the hardware and the software that will run on it.
This gives uninformed buyers (i.e. grandma - just to stick with a known stereotype) confidence that they're not buying something awful for their grandchild.
Before the pedants jump in, I know this is an over-simplification and there are bad games on consoles, yes yes..
But that's the general idea.. It's like the Apple App Store (minus the sheer volume of available software), it's a walled garden so there's an implied level of review and quality that is supposed to give consumers some confidence about the products, both hardware and software.
Also, less now than before, hardware manufacturers don't make money on the machines, they make money on the licensing for the software.
Console makers aren't interested in making devices that sell at super thin margins and provide zero incremental revenue because they get bought by a homebrew crowd that won't buy into the ecosystem.