Why Consoles Are Going Extinct

Get 4 months extra on a 2 year plan here: nordvpn.com/goingindie. It's risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee!

I’m actually terrified of cloud gaming taking over. It doesn’t just get rid of consoles, it’ll severely limit or even kill game preservation. Cloud gaming will allow publishers to erase any game they want from existence on a whim, games are art even if some are bad art. Even the worst of the worst deserves to be preserved, if at least as a warning.

"you never owned the game" marks the biggest gaslight of a self-fulfilling prophecy the industry wants to happen and remember if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

A era of gaming where you can’t really own ur games and its a month to month subscription horrifying

The issue with this entire concept is that cloud gaming is dependent on insane Internet speeds, low latency, zero wifi connectivity (how many of your friends' consoles are hardwired?), and yet even after all of this, you STILL need hardware that can handle these things... Saying things like "TVs and Phones can do the same"... No, they can't. There's only a handful of phones in the world that can properly use cloud gaming technology as it is -- and something lost in this scenario is the amount of people in this countries notes (India, China) are *low end android phones*... if these truly are the targets for Microsoft, they are sorely mistaken. Gaming in "hardware that you already own" is not only foolish, but impossible: I have a 4 year old Sharp TV with a built-in Roku and it can hardly run the Netflix app My buddy's Samsung's TV can barely run a web browser for streaming video Apple TVs do not come with a high end GPU to do anything other than 4k streaming Nintendo and Steam have figured it out with the handhelds-with-console-capability thing, and that's awesome, but guess what? It's still dedicated hardware

The only real concern I have with the move from physical to totally digital gaming is the issue of ownership. The nice thing about my ps2 is all of the games that I bought I still have. But with all your games in the cloud, no matter how much money you pay, they could be taken away from you at any point for any reason and there's nothing you can do about it. I want to own my games, not rent them

The day I can't buy a console and a physical piece of media is when I just start working through my 30+ year backlog.

Consoles are going extinct? Tell that to Nintendo... The Switch is fastest selling console of all time. The PS2 has sold more units but it was available for 13 years (The Switch has only been available for 7). If we compare sales only over a 7 period scale, The Switch comes out on top.

The mental gymnastics you had to go through to say the switch is not a home console are impressive gotta admit

The law needs to catch up quickly to protect consumers - we are getting to the point where people do not own the game, their game data or even their privacy.

Cloud gaming is the death of what gaming is to me. Young and future generations may find joy in it, and I understand as I get older I'm less the target audience than those younger generations. It's still sad for my generation to watch something we've loved die. Collecting and owning games you love is something that ties you to the hobby and community because what you collect on your gaming journey feels like a part of you.

First, the Switch is a console. Handhelds are consoles. Portability does not define a console. I've been playing games since the Commodore 64, and the newest gaming systems I own are a Switch, Xbox One, and a gaming PC. The Wii U is my second most favorite system of all time, behind my 3DS. I still play both. What sets both of these consoles apart from the rest was their unique interfaces and the unique possibilities for play those interfaces offered. I believe consoles will exist so long as Nintendo exists. The other companies may leave the console space to seek profits from known quantities and existing technologies, but Nintendo uniquely believes the greatest value comes from innovation and presenting new ways to play. A company can't create new ways to play when it relies on interfaces that already exist, a necessity of cloud distribution. I believe Nintendo recently re-emphasized this in a recent earnings call, they said something like, we believe creating hardware to play our software is the best course forward.

As long as most of the world is still without reliable high-speed internet, including the United states, where our internet is not only fragmented but also fraught with data caps, then I don't see offline gaming going anywhere soon

“The Switch isn't a console, because reasons.” I really didn't get that part of the video. At all. Like, you didn’t say it, but are we supposed to agree that a portable console isn’t a console, or something? You know a *ton*, and I mean a TON of people (myself included) play the Switch almost exclusively in docked mode, right?

It's crazy how you need constant updates and internet connection to play games nowadays anyway... It's sad

How is Switch not a console? I can dock it, put a cartridge in it, and use a controller (not the Joycons) to play it on my TV. Kinda like...a...wait for it... * * * A console.

Saying the Switch isn't a console just because you know it's success completely dismisses your entire argument

if digital only is the future then ill happily stick to my past

Reminds me the conversation why PCs getting extinct because Tablets. Or why we don't need handhelds anymore, because of Smartphones. Consoles are here to stay.

I personally don't believe cloud gaming will ever fully replace gaming on native hardware. I think cloud gaming will be a meaningful extension of the console or PC experience, but to say we're about to willingly play next gen games on our small phone screens instead of a large TV or monitor with all the visual bells and whistles, offline, and with no compromises is just not what I see happening. There will always be a place for gaming hardware.