I also am a Mac user who has a PS5 and a Steam Deck and honestly my SD is collecting dust. It’s a cool bit of hardware but it has too many compromises. The main problem is that it’s just not comfortable to play on. The screen is too small and the way you hold it you end up constantly looking down at is, which is just not ergonomic. The PS5 is also on in seconds from rest mode, and has the benefit of being hooked up to a 77” OLED and a nice 5.1.4 surround sound system.
For self-hosting I have several Linux and *BSD machines, but that’s server-grade hardare, not gaming hardware. None of those machines even has a GPU.
Drawing I do on my iPad Pro, for everything else I have a MacBook Pro. If I got a desktop PC it would only be used for games, I have no real need for non-server PC hardware.
But nowadays it seems like they’re just as expensive, still not as good for specs and the games are just as bug-riddled as PC games half the time.
No they aren’t ‘as expensive’, LTT did a video a while back where they tried to build a PC that could beat a PS5 for a similar price. They had to buy used parts to match the price and the PC did not include a controller ($69). If you’re going to use used parts, then also compare it to the price of a used PS5.
And Sony has been releasing all their big hits on PC anyway so yeah really no reason for me to get a PS5 that I can see.
Sure, if you want to play old-ass games, get a PC.
Yeah, the hardware in a console is mass produced, the hardware in an arcade cabinet is made in relatively small batches. Mass producing something is always a lot cheaper per unit due to economies of scale.
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
If you sell individual games, you have basically two ways of making more money: make more games or make better games so more people buy them.
The economies for a subscription service are completely different. People don’t subscribe to GamePass for a specific game, they subscribe for the entire collection. More games or better games don’t really drive up the number of subscribers. The only way to make more money is to drive down costs. You don’t make expensive, awesome games. Instead you drip-feed a steady stream of low-budget titles. You just have to make sure that the value of access to the entire collection is just about worth the subscription price.
Microsoft doesn’t care about games, they care about making money. They didn’t get into gaming because of a love for games, they realized it’s a market they didn’t dominate yet.
They lured people into GamePass with day-1 drops of AAA titles and now that the subscribers are there it’s time to squeeze as much money out of the service as possible.
And it’s not just GamePass. It’s all subscription services. Netflix is a good example: quality has been going down there for years.
The only real exception seems to be music streaming, but that’s mainly because there are so many artists and practically no exclusivity. In other words: there is healthy competition in the music streaming business.