My letter suggested that game consoles aren't going to be necessary in the future because emulators could play the video games.
Ironically, I ended up being totally right. Even game consoles run emulators of other game consoles, and a lot of games you buy on PC are just a rom with an emulator.
I think at this moment it's looking like PCs won a decisive victory. Microsoft is looking like they'll leave the console business, Sony's generation is sad, Nintendo has screwed up hard, and PC handhelds are better than ever.
>Even game consoles run emulators of other game consoles
Huh? So how come consoles aren't more compatible with older games? I come from the #PlayStation fanbase and have long been wishing for a classic console that can play #PS1, #PS2 and #PS3 games. It should be more than doable with emulators, despite #Sony's grumblings some years ago that such emulation would be impossible for them to pull off.
I think a lot of the discussion of backwards compatibility is related to business models.
If you have the console naturally support your game, then you can sell a console. If you don't, then you can sell an overpriced re-release effectively every time you put out a new console. The overpriced re-release is often just an emulator and rom packaged together.
The SNES Classic and Playstation Classic I have are both consoles running modernish hardware and a software emulator underneath.
Many games were sold on the Wii and Wii U from the NES, SNES, and N64, and people were able to extract the game roms to use on non-commercial emulators as I recall.
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>If you have the console naturally support your game, then you can sell a console. If you don't, then you can sell an overpriced re-release effectively every time you put out a new console.
My thing is, making a "classic" console that emulates old systems doesn't cause that problem because the original version of a game won't be the same as the remaster, and those games will probably be OOP anyways.
@sj_zero Once you needed a hard drive for updates, and a network connection, a console had all the components of a PC.
So a console that plays games as good as PC games, costs as much as a PC. The only possible advantage you can gain is using ARM for better performance per watt, and Apple is already doing that in their laptops.
Effective DRM was the other selling point of consoles (for developers) but networked multiplayer games cover the piracy issue.
So consoles have no advantage now.