Are Consoles now = PCs?

[Brian Boru]

Just saw following on Wikipedia:
"This rapid type of industry convergence has caused the distinction between video game console and personal computers to disappear. A game console with high-speed microprocessors attached to a television set is, for all intents and purposes, a computer and monitor. "

Video game industry - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What do you think?

It caught my eye particularly as I already use TVs as monitors, and the last 2 console generations have certainly been progressing on becoming more PC-like—I haven't looked at the latest gen 5 ones yet. However, I need convincing that the following advantages of PC gaming are now becoming available to console players:

Tens of thousands of titles exclusive to PC;
Constant sales at the retailers, mega sales twice a year, and free game(s) every week from a top retailer;
Dozens to hundreds of mods for many of the popular games;
Good controls for strategy and shooting games;
Upgradability;
Better graphics—but of course at a price;
Graphics settings and frames per second customizability.

Those of you who have used or studied the gen 5 consoles, what's their progress on these aspects?

I'm pretty sure consoles and PCs will converge for gaming within a decade or so, but I'd be surprised to hear it's happened already.

 

[Colif]

Power wise, yes
Upgrade wise, no... unless you can swap GPU in after a few years and not buy a new console instead?
Multi purpose wise, no. You can use a PC for far more things than a games console.

some games better suited to PC mainly based on controls. Any game that needs more than 8 keys is a struggle on console, I have seen what they did to PC games to squish their controls on consoles before, it doesn't work for some games. ARPG for instance,
Civ games too but I bet they try to squish everything on now to make money... if it fitted on a phone, even better, Dumb games down to make them more open to everyone. Pass.

 

[Krud]

Just saw following on Wikipedia:
"This rapid type of industry convergence has caused the distinction between video game console and personal computers to disappear. A game console with high-speed microprocessors attached to a television set is, for all intents and purposes, a computer and monitor. "

I feel like they don't understand what "all intents and purposes" means.

Some intents and purposes? Yeah, sure. But all? Not even close.

You can hack/mod consoles to act more like a PC, but not out of the box, and certainly not easily enough for the average console consumer looking to use it as a computer. If anything, I would say PC's are closer to being like consoles, rather than the other way around. But even then you often have to add emulators to the mix.

I mean, are people doing digital painting on their consoles? Because if so then I might have to re-evaluate my stance, but AFAIK that's not happening. Maaaaybe on the Switch, I don't know, but even then, the Switch is missing plenty of PC-related features.

I'd definitely like to see a report, or video, or article, or all three, where someone tries to see what all they can do computer-wise with a slightly tweaked console. (Programming, word processing/printing, digital art/painting/audio, etc.)

 

[Alm]

Smartphones are more like PCs than consoles are.

Unless the Steam Deck counts as a console.

 

[ZedClampet]

This is the last console generation. Future "consoles" will just be subscription services you add to your television, phone or PC. PS and Xbox will just be like Netflix.

 

[Face Hugger]

Consoles are too uniquely customized to be considered a PC. They have customized SoC's / APU's a consumer cannot get their hands on. Different types of memory existing within the same system - some for general and game compute, different memory dedicated for things like background tasks and displaying fonts in 4K. Extra CPU's only used for background tasks. Customized storage, storage controllers, busses, and I/O pipelines that would be foreign to a PC builder / user running Windows or Linux. Etc.

And beyond all that there's not really any considerable software or hardware customization that can be done. They have their walled-off operating systems and strict hardware compatibilities and that's it.

I think that if Valve maintains a baseline of hardware that they will continue to support in the Deck, as well as leaving things such as Proton open, then it would be the first console that could be considered a PC.

 

[Brian Boru]

This is the last console generation

I expect there'll be one more. I don't see worldwide internet speeds being enough this decade for cloud-only.

 

[Krud]

I expect there'll be one more. I don't see worldwide internet speeds being enough this decade for cloud-only.

Yeah, I think we'll see a PS6 (or equivalent if not named that.) I think Sony likes their hardware too much to switch entirely to software only just yet. Same with Nintendo, I'm sure they'll come up with something after the Switch, unless they drastically change their business model sometime soon.

 

[Brian Boru]

Sony likes their hardware too much to switch entirely to software only just yet. Same with Nintendo

Right, they're like Apple & Dell & Asus etc etc.

Switching from consumer hardware to software—or vice versa—is very difficult. Walmart took a long time to get their ecommerce working to a level where they can compete with Amazon. Microsoft always had good entry-level mice & keyboards, but the Surface has taken a long time to get to wherever it is at the moment.

Sony has always been a great hardware company—breakthru TV tech in the 70s, Walkman, PlayStation. That builds a culture over many decades which in many ways is unsuitable for a very different product sector like software.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Consoles are too uniquely customized to be considered a PC. They have customized SoC's / APU's a consumer cannot get their hands on. Different types of memory existing within the same system - some for general and game compute, different memory dedicated for things like background tasks and displaying fonts in 4K. Extra CPU's only used for background tasks. Customized storage, storage controllers, busses, and I/O pipelines that would be foreign to a PC builder / user running Windows or Linux. Etc.

And beyond all that there's not really any considerable software or hardware customization that can be done. They have their walled-off operating systems and strict hardware compatibilities and that's it.

I think that if Valve maintains a baseline of hardware that they will continue to support in the Deck, as well as leaving things such as Proton open, then it would be the first console that could be considered a PC.

Speaking strictly as an armchair follower of tech, aren't they are closer then ever before from the hardware side though. Wouldnt using the same basic CPU and GPU architectures across all consoles and PC be a factor in allowing so much crossplay across multiplayer games these days, and also make it easier to port games across between all platforms?

That's just what I'd assumed, and also what I assumed was meant by this wiki article.