New Xbox & AI CEO announced via Twitter ( not calling it x) the new “hybrid” console that will play Xbox and PC games.
In other words you know just a PC. Thus far it seems the system will use the exact same Xbox desktop experience as the “rog ally”.
While we all saw it coming and there isn’t much surprise. This to me says Xbox is dead as a platform.
It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to have Windows. It’s going to have co-pilot it’s going to have the same pop ups.
At least we get an Ally ROG desktop at most a Surface Gaming Desktop. Either honestly is a terrible idea. There will be most affordable options not tied to windows there will be mode powerful options at the same price. Even if you like the idea of going all in PC gaming this won’t be your best option.
If you want to stay a console gamer you’re going to have to switch teams …
RIP Xbox.
Consoles meant something back when commodity PC hardware was not good at playing games - at least not for a consumer-accessible price.
The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).
You don’t need that anymore though, a PC can do it all. You don’t even need to be on a specific OS anymore for most games.
Form factor or other novel hardware is going to be the only thing anyone can do; I think this is why Nintendo didn’t bother to make a behemoth console and try to compete with PS5
…What?
The NES had a 6502, the SNES had what amounts to a 16-bit version of the 6502, the Genesis had two CPUs, a Zilog Z80 and a Motorola 68000. I will grant you, their video chips were a bit more specialized for playing games, with sprite generators and such, lacking text or bitmap modes. Consoles mostly dominated arcade action, PC games were often slower paced but in many ways technically superior. True 3D graphics happened on PC earlier, hardware 3D acceleration happened on PC earlier, it wasn’t until the Xbox One/PS4 era that game consoles pretty much became entry level worsened gaming PCs.
Consoles were cheaper, specialized computers made specifically for games, PCs were far more expensive but significantly more powerful. No console in 1995 would run Descent or Mechwarrior 2.
That stopped being the case some time around the Xbox 360 era; By then, it was fairly common to see console ports of PC games or vice versa; console versions might lack multiplayer or have reduced graphics or something, the PC has pretty much always been the home of nerdier shit like flight simulators, but by the PS3 and PS4 era consoles basically became entry level gaming PCs. Console prices increased to the point that, for the cost of a PS5 Pro, you could put together a reasonable gaming PC…then ChatGPT ate all the world’s semiconductors and the child rapist in chief bombed Iran apparently on a whim and that brings us to the present moment.
I mean, Sony & Microsoft consoles are basically PCs with a custom OS now already (PS4 onwards, and Xbox One both used x86-64 CPUs).
There are fewer and fewer reasons to buy a specific (and expensive) piece of hardware that is less flexible in terms of functionality than the alternatives, so this is Sony trying to protect their own fiefdom.
Fuck ‘em.