The Death Of Console Gaming

A brief blog post - or a rant, rather.

Today, Sony announced that they would be shutting down PS3 + PS Vita stores, and also stop physical media production after January 2028.

And, with everything going on, the Switch 2 may be the last console I ever buy.

With the current state of the gaming industry, you don’t own your games, and your consoles are paperweights. They are not even special. They are just regular computers that you have less control over its hardware and software - of which you pay fortunes for.

Expensive Games

When you look at numbers, games used ot be so cheap.

Well, the argument is, inflation.

And I actually took the time to look at this myself. I compared the price of Nintendo gaming consoles, and some Pokemon and Mario Kart games over time, and found that there is generally a ratio of price : median household income (USD), and every once in a while, the prices appear to change by another notable amount.

You can see that every once in a while, there are these “bumps”. That’s what I am referring to.

But you don’t have to be a genius to see that the affordability ratio is decreasing. I could check on the latest income numbers, but when you look at the Switch 2 cost compared to “home consoles”, it just looks like a bump.

So yeah, everything is just expensive. And with the current state of the economy, who knows who will even want to buy games.

You could argue that we are just in the “bump”, and soon we will have the money that makes it actually cheaper in value.

That would be fine, except:

The Games Kind Of Suck

I don’t want to say its entirely nostalgia based, but there is some nostalgia in this.

In general, especially for Nintendo, the games (and console experience) have become less fun and more “corporate” over time. The 3DS and Wii U to the Switch/Switch 2 is an obvious example, with its bland home menu, its lack of music (even on Switch 2?), the attempt to erase Miis out of existence, etc.

And as for the games, I mean, Pokemon on the Switch was quite a downgrade from 3DS. I haven’t played any of the Galar games, and I’ve only played Violet about half way I think, but you can still feel (and I know Violet was struggling with performance but I have the upgrade pack), that the games are just not made with much love anymore. In all the other games, every corner would be packed with something to do - a character of dialogue, an item to pickup - and Paldea is so.. empty.. in comparison…

Oh did I mention that if you want to go online, you need to pay? Yeah, NSO. Used to be free. Come on. Best plan is if you can get a group of friends and buy a discounted family pack. But it’s still milking money.

Speaking of paying, a lot of the times, you don’t get the full game anymore. It’s all DLC. If I remember correctly, Pokemon Legends Z-A even launched with paid DLC on release day. Which is crazy. And GTA VI is also locking a lot of features, potentially plot as penguinz0 speculated, behind DLC.

Great.

So you’re getting expensive games (which companies can charge because they can get away with it), that are less quality and less fun, and you need to pay for DLC and online services.

Good thing you “own” the games.

Game Ownership and Physical vs. Digital

This is the big one that everyone has been talking about.

Physical games are nice because, well, you get a physical item to hold, a box, all that fun stuff.

Digital games are nice because you don’t need to go out and get a physical copy, you can just get the game without leaving your house.

But, as we are seeing with the shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita stores, and with Sony taking out people’s movies that they purchased, and looking into the terms of service, you don’t “own” digital games.

Well, you do, if you can trust the digital store that they won’t take away your purchases. I don’t think Steam ever has done this in the history of ever - you buy something, you keep it.

All of the big gaming companies make it clear that they can revoke your ownership at any time. Keep in mind, if you have DLC that comes with a subscription, you stop paying for it, you lose it.

Imagine the same for full games - and I think this may already be a thing. I think I’ve heard about some games being “inaccessible” after 30 days of misuse.

I will say: Digital games are convenient, easier to get, probably more environmentally friendly, and honestly an amazing combination with smart home technology and IoT. But as it stands, digital purchases just seem to be “renting” a game, that also makes it harder to share/borrow a game with/from a friend, and even make it harder to try to save money.

Some games have high prices, like Super Mario Maker 2, which is $60 if I remember correctly. You can get a physical copy on eBay for much lower. And if you think about it, this actually makes sense, because if you don’t have NSO, or when the servers shut down, the game becomes useless. By removing the physical component, you are forced to take the higher prices.

As for game sharing: Digital game sharing is a thing, I know Nintendo has “virtual game cards”, but I think they may just be for the system only? I don’t think, unless you’re in the same family plan, that you can temporarily lend a game over to a friend so they can play it until they’re done using it. Even for libraries, which have games, it allows for people to try before they buy, or just grind the game until they finish and move on.

This is lost, and if anything, significantly harder.

So why is physical media making a return? Because you can be certain that you own the product. You can be assured that it won’t be taken away from you. This is why it is popular, and for this and also the reasons above about good quality games, why retro consoles are kind of making a comeback.

Digital purchases would be great, but I don’t think anyone can trust the store owners to not take away our purchases.

And for me, even if I trusted Nintendo, which so far they seem okay - they don’t even have IoT/smart home integration, so, yeah. Physical is actually easier because I think there is some weird Amazon product that is like, automatic remote console cartridge switching.

Your Rights Of Ownership

Even with the physical vs. digital game thing aside, there are still things that you don’t “own” or at the very least have less control over.

The root of this, is that consoles will likely become unhackable. With AI tools, and code scanners, fuzzers, hardware glitch detection, and decades of experience with console gaming security, I find it hard to believe that consoles will ever be hackable.

Before you say I am being a pessimist, lets be real, nobody is going to buy a military-grade fault injection device for their console, which comes at high risk of being destroyed in the process. I’ve already talked about how Switch 2 hacking will be hard.

And software vulnerabilities, as we are seeing, are pretty much gone. Although I guess Sony had some PS5 kernel exploits? But they got patched. And we probably won’t see more in the future.

So you can’t mod your consoles anymore. The fun of hacking a console, porting your libraries and toolchains over to it, integrating with the console software, reverse engineering it, just to run games or whatever you want on some hardware it was not meant to run - is over.

And even if you did, it’s not like the 6th generation of gaming consoles when the hardware was particularly unique to computers. It’s cool having access to computers of different CPU architectures. But now everything is basically a usual amd64 or arm64 processor. Heck, the Switch is basically a Tegra computer which you can buy and build a touch screen device to attach yourself.

This leads to: Since you can’t mod your consoles, you can’t dump it. And with no physical items, you can’t even try to get the storage data. It’s all locked. Unless you somehow find a way to trick the stores or CDN’s into downloading the game to your computer (which would actually be interesting, but probably easily fixable for game consoles). This also means no more preservation.

So you don’t own your games. You don’t own the hardware (because you can’t even control it, thanks to hardware glitch detection), and you don’t control the software - because it is most secure to not let users run anything. (Okay fine, Microsoft MAY get a leg-up due to Xbox dev mode but that’s about it).

So, is it worth purchasing something you can’t even own?

The line between PC games (Steam) and console games

Unless there are console exclusive games, why spend the money?

The PC market has many more games, and you can definitely dump or preserve PC games. The Steam Deck, if I remember correctly, was basically made to be as open as possible (because it is literally Linux and will let you run anything). And you can actually trust Steam with games, and at the same time, emulate the games you already have!

Besides, people are smart enough now that they can just recreate the AAA games that everyone is buying, when you think about it, given enough time.

So why buy it?

Conclusion

Console gaming is just going to suck.

No good games - let alone affordable ones, nothing exciting about the hardware, nothing fun about the software, because you can’t modify or hack it, no game ownership - it makes PC gaming the best option out there.

Of course, miracles can still happen. Some unpatchable hardware bug is found, or Nintendo decides “maybe we can relax some restrictions - or maybe start giving features that the community has wanted for years so people won’t want to mod it in the first place”.

But with the Stop Killing Games initiative pretty much dying (we tried our best…), uh, this is it!

You will have much more fun with a PC than an actual gaming console. Unless you enjoy the exclusives, which are hopefully still up to standards and are worth using. You can run Linux and do whatever.

But as for the future, it looks bleak. I would bet on there being another video game market crash soon.