The best thing to come out of all the recent chat about the future of living room game boxes isn’t Project Helix, or whatever the PS6 will be. It’s this:
No, not the Steam Machine itself, on which the jury is still very much out in terms of its viability, but this specific one with the wooden faceplate. Look at that. Gorgeous. Like Magnavox designed the GameCube. A sensory blast of nostalgia that you can run Cyberpunk on. It’s just a changeable faceplate, but showing off this throwback design was, I think, perhaps unwittingly, the opening salvo of the next console war.
As this most damp squib of a console gen starts wrapping up before it ever really got going, PlayStation and Xbox both find themselves hurtling toward an existential cliff-edge: the console business is stagnant, possibly even contracting, as up and coming generations Z, Alpha, and Future Survivors of the AI Apocalypse simply don’t have any lingering affection for these brands, their consoles, or the kinds of games they specialise in. Roblox runs on their phones, and kids are about as discerning about their entertainment as the average middle-aged man is about garage flowers on February 13.
It’s the middle-aged who are, therefore, the big-but-ever-diminishing cow whose milking sustains the Home Console business (not you, Nintendo, you're doing fine). A big, shrinking bovine whose wages aren’t going up in line with the prospect of perhaps having to spend $1,000 just to play Uncharted 5. Which is an even worse proposition when you consider that they’re not even making Uncharted 5. It’s not even on the cards. Do you realise how mad it is for PS5 to not have its own Uncharted? That's like Sega spending an entire console generation just not bothering to make a Sonic game. Which is a thing that did happen, and funnily enough, is arguably why you can play Sonic games on your Nintendo now.
In fact, the very concept of consoles has been in a dire state ever since both Sony and Microsoft started putting their signature games on other platforms, a strategy which we all had a collective madness about until recently thinking "Well, Okay, sure, it makes sense to reach beyond the install base of a console to give your expensive game every chance to do the numbers." Especially if you’re Xbox, and your install base is about the same as the Barcode Battler.
Sadly, the grand experiment of exclusive-less consoles has been a bit of a disaster. On the Sony side, it has noticeably cannibalised software and hardware sales while opening up the firm to a lot of PR grief over its decision to force PC players to have PSN accounts. On the Xbox side, it's been a significant part of a deadly mix of factors that has almost destroyed the brand along with any reason to actually own an Xbox.
But there are glimmers of hope: Sony recently pulled back from releasing future PC ports, with Ghost of Yotei no longer slated for a Steam release. And, with the unceremonious exit of Sarah Bond from Xbox – long known to be the architect of the “This is an Xbox” campaign that many considered a final nail in the coffin of Microsoft’s twenty-year attempt to break Sony’s dominance of second place in the games market – it seems as though the console as we once knew it might be primed for a comeback: a device for playing games, and the only place to play some of the best ones. As it should be.
As, I would argue, it needs to be in order to survive as a concept. Dissolving the traditional barriers for entry to the PlayStation and Xbox ecosystems may well have pushed a line up on a chart somewhere temporarily, but it has done so at the cost of the console’s prestige, its very soul. The PlayStation shouldn’t just be one possible content distribution node in a platform-agnostic continuum, it should be The PlayStation: an experience, a feeling, an identity. Something that inspires fierce loyalty. Something that does things only a PlayStation can do.
That may seem silly and anachronistic in a world where we all have a pocket supercomputer that has effectively rendered every other piece of electronics in our homes redundant, but as it turns out, Gen Z loves retro devices. When you’ve never known a world without the smartphone, the idea of a device that only does one specific thing must seem quaint. Counterintuitive. And possibly, maybe, even exciting.
I can speak to this a little bit: it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I still buy albums on CD, because I’m a decrepit old bastard. But it might surprise you to learn that they’re all for my K-pop obsessed teenage daughters, and that I haven’t bought a physical album for myself since the days of Napster. Because, as I have come to learn to my wallet’s deep dismay, South Korea still goes mad for CDs. Physical discs. Albums aren’t just music distribution: they’re an event. They’re collectible. They come in multiple editions with lavishly produced coffee table books of guys posing suggestively. I haven’t owned a CD player probably since the '90s – I didn’t even know you could still buy them – but my 16 year old has one.
(And as an aside, let me tell you something, the teenage girls of today are more serious about their music than any lad in the '90s with a subscription to the Melody Maker was. I’ll guarantee you that none of those guys were as devoted to Mercury Rev as your average K-pop fangirl is to Stray Kids.)
But look, whether it’s a genuine phenomenon or marketing hype, the trendy notion of digital detoxing or Going Analogue is highly relatable in a world of endless, exhausting interconnectivity. Retro gaming, too, counts as a form of this: for the same reason that many are swapping their smartphones for feature phones (or “dumbphones”), retro gaming is attractive to those willing to Log Off because of its relative simplicity.
Until around the turn of the century, a games console had one job: to run the game you put in it. And when you bought that game, you owned that game. It didn’t needle you with microtransactions and DLC add-ons, or ship broken with the promise of an incoming hotfix for game-breaking bugs. It just existed. It was the simplest of simple propositions: you wanna play a Nintendo game? Gotta buy a Nintendo. Wanna play a PlayStation game? Gotta buy a PlayStation.
And it’s the most naturally intuitive because, let’s be honest, multifunction devices are the aberration here: until extremely recently, a TV was a thing for watching TV on. A computer was a thing you did computer stuff on. A phone was a thing you used to make noises at people who weren’t in your house. Your Switch 2 needs a Netflix app about as much as your car needs a toast rack.
It may seem impossible for the traditional platform holders to win the hearts and minds of a demographic who have grown up in a market where video games are just one of several throwaway activities that your phone provides. But in a world where the single-function device is rapidly taking on the prestige of something noble and ancient, a relic of a more civilised age, then console makers should consider that prestige as their hook. Consider the tactile sensation of choosing an vinyl album, blowing on it, slotting it onto the turntable, and the ritual of booting up your PlayStation to enjoy one of its exclusives; the inviting startup beep, the sumptuous logo chimes, the knowledge that this machine has been purpose built for the artistic, playful activity at hand and isn’t something fundamentally designed for improving an office worker’s productivity that just happens to do games as a party trick.
I don’t know where it’s all heading, but what I can say with some confidence is that if the next generation of consoles are all bespoke variants of Steam Machine (which, given the recent Project Helix news, there’s a non-zero chance of this being the case), then console gaming will truly be over. This isn’t about physical necessarily, I’m not against digital distribution, but in a platform agnostic future where there is no differentiator between the platforms beyond a badge, the console has no prestige. The console has nothing. And I think, frankly, some things are worth keeping behind a drawbridge to protect.
Triple-A gaming shouldn’t be Spotify. It should be sliding Dreams by Fleetwood Mac out of its gatefold case, the crackle and hiss of an engaged needle deftly lining up with the groove, the smug sophistication of being a smart consumer who can appreciate every note of a single album without needing The Algo to feed them an endless playlist of stuff. That’s what prestige console gaming needs to be. But with guns and explosions and that. And if there’s a way for the platform holders of the next generation to siphon off the same magic that makes a 19 year old want to buy a flip phone, then they should do it. They should embrace the console’s bespoke nature as much as possible and stop trying to serve two masters.
Consoles can’t compete with PCs and frankly they shouldn’t try. Being the “best” or even the most convenient place to play a Steam game is a moving target that they’ll never hit. Being the only place to play a PlayStation game should, however, be a slam-dunk for PlayStation.
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