I was actually a little disappointed. Friends of mine were huge GT fans and played the shit out of it, but when I played it I found the AI opponents horribly stupid and the missing damage model was mildly weird, to say the least. I expected more than what I got. It wasn’t a bad game, but just not what I expected.

Ah yes, the Nex Playground.

And yet Valve's revenue was twice that of Sony Interactive Entertainment's. Steam can run on a generic PC; Steam Deck and GabeCube are merely gravy. Storefronts are where the money's made. Hell, haven't PS5s been selling at a loss until recently? What's 13 million times a negative amount?

I had a ps3 and a ps4 and was fully up for getting a ps5. Then it came out right around COVID time and I couldn't get one anywhere because of scalpers. So I thought, "No worries, I'll just wait a year or two and pick one up for cheap." Then it just never got cheaper. Now it's like a 5-6 year old machine that costs over $900 CAD so I just never bothered.

Good thing there's already more good games out than I could play if I lived another hundred years.

You've clearly never seen me ignore all my biological needs to play games for 14 straight hours.

Sony and Microsoft don't even know Valve exists. The Steam Deck sold in its lifetime less than each console in a few weeks after launch.

No, I prefer using something like KDE, and do a fair bit, but win11 is still not terrible.

If you want terrible, vista before service pack 2, win 8 and even xp before it got updated. Fuck xp 64bit was a genuine shit show as people tried to convert.

Now they blame millennials and gen z kids for ruining gaming

And then they switch to everything being a live service so instead of buying games you just have access to the "whole library" of games (for whatever payment tier you're in) which they will change and remove games without warning and deleting all of your progress unless you pay them at least $20 a month for cloud saves

Oh and the only games in the games library are ai slop vibe coded games that are unplayable carbon copies of each other

I do have a steam deck, and have also used several Linux installs. If you are booting a Linux pc you should be entering a password.

You can also have a local account on windows 11 and not have a password. So it just boots to desktop and shows steam. I personally don't have big picture running on windows, I have a mouse and just click on the game I want to play.

I also have never experienced windows stopping me from playing with a controller(Xbox, ps5 or steam controllers old and new), or interacting with big picture mode.

It seems like you have tiny things that you are blowing way out of proportion. Like a windows pc taking longer to load than a console, we are talking seconds difference.

Amateur!

I am all for the little guy. I looked up all the stats because of what you said. PS roughly 10 million estimated by end of year, Xbox roughly 2 million by end of year. Gabecube maybe around 60k per month with a total in 2026 of around 400k units sold. That will be roughly half of Xbox sales if they performed similarly the entire year.

Impressive start, but the PS blows them out of the water.

Every GT game has shitty AI. I mostly play them to just drive a whole lot of cars fast on a track for fun.

It literally says Windows CE on the console…

Good lesson to learn. You can possibly still sell all that shit and break even, the way prices are these days.

Because I see so many Sega Dreamcasts in my day to day life, in 2026. Man, fuck off. Have some curiosity about the world.

Thank you for the detailed answer! That's interesting!

Lol

Lol as if one person can be the cause of all this

The sold.oit because they're not making them in any mind of volume because the components are either super expensive or, increasingly, simply not being manufacturered.

The gaming industry is quickly approaching a huge cliff. The user base is almost impossible to grow at these prices, and as existing consoles/PCs die, the current crop of customers won't be able to buy replacements.

The bloodshed we've seen over the past 2-3 years in the gaming industry is nothing compared to what's coming if hardware prices don't come back down.

The new Xbox coming out next year is going to have direct Steam support. And that's no accident.

Xbox series X|S sold a total of just under 35 million. Those are actually estimate numbers, as Microslop stopped reporting their (embarrassing) numbers years ago.

Steam has an average of 38.5 million concurrent users, with a peak of 43.5 million users.

Steam is literally bigger than Microslop's Xbox division, and infinitely more profitable. Sony's PS5 has sold something like 91 million units.

The Steam Deck isn't the relevant metric here. Every single computer with Steam installed is.

You fuck off, too lazy to zoom in on a picture of it LMAO

I'll eat my shoe if a PC under $1000 will be able to play GTA VI even halfway decently when it comes to the platform. My handheld PC is nominally way more powerful than my Series S, but I'm lucky to get half the performance out of it because the Series S gets a bespoke treatment from devs to make it work well.

The handheld PC market is really becoming competition, huh?

OMG! It's almost like constantly raising prices just isn't working out!

It doesn't matter how expensive RAM gets, what the market is doing, how much AI is driving up component prices, or whether the market is bullish or bearish. At some point, consumers reach a breaking point. When a product becomes too expensive, people stop buying it. They don't particularly care why it's expensive. They care whether it's worth the asking price, and whether they can justify spending that much money on it.

And that's the problem Sony and Microsoft seem to be running into. Between rising console prices, increasingly expensive games, subscription price hikes, and a growing number of anti-consumer practices, they've made gaming an increasingly expensive hobby while giving consumers fewer reasons to feel good about spending their money.

What's worse is that these companies have spent years alienating a significant portion of their own fan bases. Aggressive monetization, digital ownership concerns, restrictive ecosystems, and the push toward subscriptions have steadily eroded consumer goodwill. You can only squeeze your customers so much before they start questioning whether they want to remain customers at all.

At the end of the day, consumers aren't obligated to buy a PlayStation or an Xbox just because they bought one last generation. They can stick with their existing hardware, buy fewer games, switch platforms, or walk away from gaming altogether.

You can't price your way to endless growth, especially when you're simultaneously giving your customers more reasons not to buy your products. Eventually, the market pushes back. And frankly, it's hardly surprising that we're seeing that happen now.

I won't purchase another system because I don't want to deal with 1) constant downloads- new games, game updates, system updates, data collection 2) logging in all the time 3) not owning a physical copy of a game.

They complicated the fuck out of doing basic things on their systems and I want no part of it. What have they done to keep the consumer interested in their systems?

Microtransactions, ads, no offline modes, you don't own your own games any more... well they topped all of it with the new console. You buy games that are just empty boxes. Might be a slip of paper in there letting you rent it for $80 flat fee, but they'll take that game back any time they damn well please.

NOW BEG FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT PEASANT.

If I have to drop nearly $1k on a gaming platform the money is so much better spent on a PC anyway.

Given how fast AI recompiles are coming out just wait a week or two.

They were clearly referring to hardware sales because that's what this post is about. As far as software sales go steam obviously does better since the market of people of with a pc is greater than consoles. Same reason why mobile is by far the largest gaming market.

Especially since on PC apps like retro arch give you better access to backlogs that these companies aren’t even offering! You want to play PS2 games 4k upscale 60 fps? Can’t do that on PS5. You can surely do it on PC though.

They’ve never taken a game back. Everyone is causing a fear that doesn’t exist. I only buy digital, never had a problem.

Yeah, being a PC is also a plus, since it isn't relegated to only being a gaming machine like consoles. Can actually use it for productivity to do things like 3d modeling, video editing, coding, etc.

Turns out, fucking over your customers is bad for buisness. Who could have guessed?

This is either a blatant lie or unfathomable ignorance.

Ubisoft has done just that and so have several others. It's the entire reason for the stop killing games movement.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Theres no way you are a "gamer" and have never heard of it.

Gooning............

Or you could buy a miyoo mini plus and get it within a week for like $50.

That's what I did and I play all my retro games on it, I even prefer it over my steam deck for retro gaming.

👍

Exclusives.

Legit the only reason.

I guess it's also "easier" in a "It just works*" kind of way. Like you can have a pretty good expectation to how well a game will run on your system, and no fiddling with settings, or drivers, etc.

This is a big point for the steam deck and similar handhelds. There's now a benchmark PC platform.

Ahead of its time, IMO. And honestly should not even have wireless. Might be usable in grandma's house out in the middle of the woods (unless Grandma's got a shit-ton of IoT stuff...or one cheap security camera), but just about anywhere else it's far too unreliable.

Honestly, almost every console runs on my PC. Why not just make Microsoft Xbox for Linux?

The hardware now is just an x64 or ARM platform built to a certain spec running a custom OS. Basically, a PC or a tablet or a Mac Mini.

When you look at it that way, the idea of these walled-garden publishers and marketplaces starts to make absolutely zero fucking sense.

The need for consoles is rapidly getting eroded. There's no proprietary hardware, no special sauce, nothing that they can do that a moderately spec'd PC can't do, and often for less money.

Where they still succeed is just being easy enough, that they more-or-less just work predictably with barely more effort than running the updates that it prompts the user to run. And they're fucking all that up with stupid shit like Virtual Gamecards. It's honestly impressive that Nintendo managed to be the straw that broke my fucking back, would've never seen that coming. At least I knew what I was signing up for with GamePass (and they knew exactly why I term'd it when I did).

Did we forget Nintendo shut down their entire store just to open a new one?

I literally own two ps4s and two copies of a game my SO and I wanted to play together, but neither of us have an active PS+. We would both have to resub just to play it together in the same room. It ended up being cheaper just to buy two copies again on Steam to play it together on PC/laptop. There's no reason to own a console anymore. Their convenience is completely gone.

Plus they bought up all those game studios only to close them, lay off all the workers, and cancel the finished or in-progress games for tax breaks. And like Sony, they have said that they will no longer support physical games, creating a monopoly in their digital store and destroying further goodwill from gamers like me. They have completely lost the plot...

People have unfairly held US presidents responsible for the state of the economy in the past... But in this case Trump's illegal tariffs and pointless war with Iran absolutely are the cause of current high prices, or at least huge contributing factors. Republicans are a disaster for the economy...

Everything is too expensive now! Late-stage capitalism sucks...

He's both effect and cause, he wouldn't be there if the USA didn't have fundamental social problems, and if he didn't exist, someone else could have been in his place causing different problems

Gaming is not an expensive hobby at all if you stick to good games. The best game in the world runs on a Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM.

People aren't having kids. Without kids who will play the video-games?

Not Sony or MS.