The end of the gaming console???

Steam itself isn't killing consoles. Steam is just an expression of what Michael Pachter is describing, and has been talked about several times before this, I remember hearing speculation about a no-console future as early as 2005. The reason consoles exist is because in their early days (60s and 70s) there had to be a way to sell these pieces of hardware to markets large enough to make financial sense. Not everyone owned a computer, the only device capable of running video games, and even less people owned arcade cabinets, the only other device capable of running video games. So an alternative had to be devised, what you get is the gaming console. A stripped down computer that could only run a very specific type of software and could be attached to a display device, the television. It's no wonder that the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was made by Magnavox, a television manufacturer.

So consoles continued to be produced because video games were software, and not all people, potential customers, owned a computer. Hence, consoles are required to play games. Consoles weren't the vehicle for video games, consoles were the end point, with video games being an incentive to buy into them. Originally a very cheap incentive, since most consoles had the exact same games and didn't differentiate between themselves in any meaningful way, leading to everyone and their mother getting into the video game business and launching their own consoles. This led to that video game crash (at least in America, other countries didn't have the crash for various reasons). Though, at least at this point the console was sort of validated by the tech of the day - consoles starting with things like Nintendo, were able to scroll along with the player (ex in Mario games, the screen follows Mario as he goes forward), computers at the time couldn't scroll along with the player, leading to games requiring the loading of new rooms and such. But when John Carmack figured out adaptive tile refresh, it allowed PCs to compete with consoles for certain types of games. The limiting factor was now only how many people owned PCs vs consoles (and, probably also significant - the gamer generations were being born at this time, so the people who wanted to play video games probably couldn't afford PCs. So it's conceivable that for gamers in the 90s, video gaming was, in their minds, a console only thing.)

But that's not true anymore. As computers, desktops or laptops, become more and more powerful and cheaper as time goes on, more and more people own them. That's the situation you have today, where something around the 50% of Americans own a console but something like 75+% own a desktop. PewResearch. According to that, the only devices consoles win out over are tablets and ebooks, devices that are relatively new to the mainstream audience. And tablets are almost owned just as much as consoles are. So the environment is quite different than the one that birthed consoles.

So, then people could argue that consoles will always exist as custom purpose built machines for gaming, similar to a role they have today. Modern consoles attempt to offer a more PC type of user experience by offering internet browsers, keyboard add-ons, etc. The argument could be made that consoles, which primarily focus on video games, could be custom built to surpass PCs... except that's not even the case today. In most cases cheap GPUs (the $150 Nvidia GTX 750 comes to mind) can run console games on PC better than the console can. And it was common for consoles to just use cheaper computer parts in their construction. So you have a situation where computers are outperforming consoles in their specialized field and being more accessible to the average person, hence having a much wider market.

Of course console manufacturers want there to always be consoles, they make money on selling them. Developers, however, don't. It's much more lucrative for developers to directly sell the game to the consumer without having to pay stocking fees at Gamestop or Wal-mart. It's probably even cheaper to pay someone else to host services like Steam and sell them that way than it would be to eat the manufacturing/shipping/stocking costs. It also doesn't help that computers can have controllers attached, or can be set up to a TV or wirelessly broadcast to a TV in addition to doing other things that consoles don't.

It becomes even worse for consoles because games can be streamed. Even if we were to buy into the myth of a console's superior hardware, with cloud gaming the user's PC is almost irrelevant. Cloud gaming runs all the software operation on a server, the end result (the actual game itself) is then streamed to a user's PC. Hence, the important of a console is diminished even further.

The basic idea is that consoles existed and thrived because of some very real foundations that created a marketplace. But those foundations aren't so valid anymore, and maybe less valid in the future, and the market place is bigger outside of those old foundations. Consoles are like beepers, its possible that they could exist in the future in niche markets, but you'll end up with devices that are limited in functionality compared to everything else.

Also, keep in mind that at some point consoles self-perpetuated themselves. In the early days of consoles gaming, none of the games were exclusives to each console, usually they were exact copies of games you could find on competing consoles but sold under different names. Though it happened much earlier, Nintendo's use of the Mario mascot set the precedent for a console to have a given identity - a rule that consoles still follow even with "unofficial" mascots like the Master Chief for Xbros and Nathan Drake for Sony Ponies. Though this varies from year to year (Lara Croft before Nathan Drake, Polygon Man waaay before her).



So, while more and more games also launch on the PC platform, alot of "mascot" games didn't. For example, as far as I'm aware Nintendo games haven't released any of their games for PC. So, at least with Nintendo, you end up with consoles existing because they are the only way to play those games, and the reason its the only way to play those games is because consoles exist, which are the only way to play those games...