There is no point to consoles anymore. It used to be that consoles were easy to use and cheaper while PCs were more expensive and complex. That is no longer the case. Computers are stupid easy now and consoles have become to expensive.

If buying does not equal owning something, piracy can't equal theft. At this rate, what's the point of consoles?

I don't understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this. The only draws of consoles was the turnkey hardware, which you can generally get with Proton now, and access to physical games, which won't be a thing soon. Now it's just a locked-down PC with a DRM storefront that makes you pay a subscription to pay online games and which may or may not have backwards compatibility from system to system.

Maybe that's just the PC gamer in me talking. Are there any advantages to console anymore? Like, a single benefit?

Can anyone come up with a single example of an industry that's not getting simultaneously worse (and/or smaller), and more expensive?

People don't care. Most just want to feed on SoMe. A bunch even voted Trump as President - impressed that humas has survived this long

Closing bluepoint is madness. That studio was really good at remastering games

They're betting on consumers being too impulsive and stupid to care, and... they're probably right.

Yet another common PlayStation L

Just the second great video game crash, not quite a secret landfill of E. T. Games but this is just as bad imo

I'm gonna miss them as they were the only way of playing paid games via Playstation 4 since you couldn't buy digital games via PS Store if you were living in an unavailable country.

Really what needs to happen is a few companies consolidate regional dev talent and become software companies.

If I was sony I'd bet on steamos. Nintendo would be in the best position if their games weren't locked to their systems. Because their wheel house is low spec games that could run on anything.

End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It's just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.

Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.

So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn't really worth it.

Then, specifically for the PlayStation there's Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they're the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the "Sony Rootkit" scandal)

So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn't at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.

Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.

I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.