alt Hacker NewsI read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing.
Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
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Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
We have this now, every PC has some kind of graphics hardware, and has for many years. Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands, but the technical justification for their product category hasn't existed for 15+ years now.
To be fair had RAM prices not screwed up the steam machine consoles would have been dooms earlier. They are about to enter a slow decline before death
Nintendo will always exist, which I'm mostly okay with
I wouldn't be surprised if consoles got replaced by video game streaming. Not the next generation and probably not even the generation after that, but that will be most likely it.
> PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse
Source? Is that reddit?
It simply doesn't make sense.
> PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse
PC is even more digital-only than Playstation. No one buys physical games on PC. The only difference is that Valve has been a very good steward over Steam. Theoretically, PC can get as enshittified as PS.
I guess there are other DRM-based purchasing platforms, and there's also DRM free ones like GOG so PC gamers have choice, but those feel niche mostly.
That backlash was nearly entirely on that other social media website that HN hates being compared to. And yet again, not representative of actual people. The xbox part may be true. I’d be extremely surprised if any PlayStation users in volume move to PC, that might be another loud opinion from that crowd due to the physical disc outrage. They would pay twice as much, have a less seamless experience, and still have worse graphics/performance.
I say this as a primarily pc gamer. It’s not for most people.
PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.
People age out of wanting to sit in their bedroom with a handheld and become adults who have living rooms. For home gaming there will always be demand to play games on a real sized screen.
It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/06/switch-2s-first-ye...
I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.
We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.
Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.