I don’t disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.
And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.
Considering piracy equivalent to hardware theft is just intellectually dishonest. In a lot of ways, but relevant to this discussion is that piracy is way less risky, so more people do it. If you try to steal a PS5 from a store I’d go as far to say you’d probably get caught and jailed. With piracy you almost definitely won’t get caught.
I’d say they are. “Mom groups who want to play Animal Crossing-esque games” certainly aren’t what I’d think of when I’d think “dedicated gaming enthusiasts,” at least not what most people are thinking of.
Steam Deck lacks publicity relative to Nintendo Switch or even traditional PC gaming, but the product itself is absolutely more accessible than traditional PC gaming, even if not as accessible as consoles.
If I was seeing RISC-V get widespread adoption in consumer-grade hardware, I’d be thinking about it (granted, having X86-64 and ARM on the market could make room for a third competitor compared to the 15-year x86 hegemony.) But I don’t see a push for that, and there probably won’t be unless RISC-V delivers better results than ARM. Keep in mind that you and I probably care more about CPU architecture than the average gamer.
While only the Steam Deck has achieved massive success, it shows there are ways to reduce the prep time for PC gaming, to almost as little as modern consoles (since you do, ultimately, have to install drivers on console.)
Gaming PC (PC games plus emulation of most systems, including Android and arcades)
2, 3, and 4. Some combination of three systems with large exclusive libraries for which emulation isn’t quite there yet or have unique features that make emulation suboptimal (Sega Saturn, Original Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS3, and PS5 come to mind)
Also just due to sheer age, which makes it the platform with the most games period, dating back to 1995 in terms of games you can play on modern hardware without an emulator (I know it’s getting harder to run Windows 95/98 games now but it should still be possible with effort for a lot of games, unless Windows 11 got rid of something)