Looks like top management has completely given up on gaming following the disastrous acquisitions of Activision and Zenimax.
They've killed their first party studios, their hardware and now their last remaining thing which was the game pass.
Always remember, Fitgirl is free.
This was always inevitable. The slow, agonizing death of the console has been obvious since the seventh generation, as has the methods by which that death would come: the PC and the necessity of subscriptions.
Consoles are now just a cost-cut PC and they're necessarily going to be a worse deal than a PC because they're unable to perform basic general-purpose computing tasks.
One-time sales simply aren't good enough to create the infinite growth capitalists desire, and the profit margins and timeframes of (especially AAA) game development are simply too scary for capitalists to want to pony up the cash. We're going to continue seeing this sort of retraction happen across the entire entertainment industry and in other industries in coming years.
Execs forcing MTX and Subscriptions into AAA titles is the death of AAA Gaming. Most AAA are shit nowadays anyways.
Absolutely. Monetization has always been the problem. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall necessitates worse and worse monetization schemes.
It's a mirror to the death of the weekend car. Something purpose built for cruising or offroading. Everything in every aspect of daily life is becoming general purpose.
I'm not smart enough to know this, but it seems like consoles would be really useful if they were more self-contained? Like games come in cartridges and sometimes those cartridges have additional hardware so the game runs smoother with better graphics than it would on PC. I suspect this is too costly, which is why consoles have moved away from the cartridge.
One of the advantages of the Super NES, for example, was you just plugged games in and there were zero load times. I know the N64 and various Gameboy games had additional hardware built into some cartridges to do things the console wouldn't normally be able to do.
I think if a major company (Sega?) put out something like the Playdate it would do very well. The desire for more graphical power was a mistake and limitation breeds creativity.
Unfortunately, cartridges are crazy expensive, especially if you're adding extra hardware. Baba Is You and Undertale are both great games that would seem like ideal games for a simple modern console, but tbh I would not pay $140 for either game.