by Doc – Owner, Founder, Is Just Glad Sega Didn’t Win the Console Wars
I’m assuming you’ve heard the news.
There is no gif, image, video, sentence or description that can accurately capture the sheer amount of mindblownness that this has hit me with. For my entire life, the only three real competitors in the console space have been Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, and Microsoft hasn’t been a competitor in a good long while. The system was predictable; Nintendo had the handheld and the weird console, Microsoft had the FPS people who cheated on their homework and drank Mountain Dew, and Sony had the FPS people and the people who don’t like Nintendo. PC and mobile gaming was kind of in there as well as something that all the consoles had in common, so it wasn’t controversial, it just had decades of shovelware to shovel through. (No, the “PC Master Race” doesn’t count, those people are cringe).
This has all been blown to hell. Valve, as the sole company whose business strategy seems to be “don’t make money if it means kicking your fanbase in the wallet”, just announced Steam Hardware, and let me tell you… I think this thing wins. I think this thing wins everything.
Steam has always been known to be the best way to play games in the business. As a lifelong Nintendo guy, I will absolutely yield that Steam > Nintendo in many ways (though not in quality of games). And now, for Steam to be directly on your TV, with complete flexibility to use whatever else it is that you need to use…?
This removes the need for anyone to buy a non-Nintendo game console. Every game that’s on console ends up on PC eventually besides Nintendo content, and Nintendo usually has some kind of form factor that grants it an interesting edge in the market no matter the state of gaming (see: the Wii, the DS, the 3DS, the Switch). Yes, Valve competes in that area somewhat with the Steam Deck, but Nintendo still beats the Deck on price (kinda) and quality exclusives. I’m not saying that Xbox and Playstation are dead, but I’ll admit that they both belong to companies for whom gaming is not their first priority, and their consoles don’t actually make money. If there were a convenient alternative for those companies to still publish games without having to eat the cost of hardware, perhaps they’d take it.
Oh yeah, and not only did they win the home console gaming front but they might be the ones to resurrect VR as a viable gaming option. I don’t know about my younger readers but I always heard, since the Wii came out, that if virtual reality was ever going to be adopted by the public at large it would have to come through video gaming, and Nintendo was the only company willing to experiment like that. Nintendo were the guys that tried weird stuff other people wouldn’t. Valve just took that title from them, and may even make it work. If the Steam Frame or whatever this thing is called ends up being a fairly useful device and it’s got the kinks worked out out of the box, it could bring VR back from the dead. I don’t care about VR personally, but it is the logical conclusion to most forms of modern entertainment.
And to think just two weeks Donald Trump declared the console wars over. 4D chess, guys.
Amiibo Doctor 