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The only people who didn't understand that this is exactly what would happen were the execs at Sony and Microsoft. The entire point of a console is that it's simple, reliable and cheap. If it's not all of those things then people will find alternatives.

Right now on eBay there's a bunch of used Ryzen 5 5600-based PCs around $600. They play rings around a console and either Windows or Linux gives you full access to Steam. And I've seen cheap-as-fuck little ARM-based Chinese portables that can access Steam and game reliably, too.

I can only imagine how many used PCs are out there on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist (do people still use Craigslist) And since both Microsoft and Sony neglected their exclusives, there's no huge reason to get either. Even the upcoming release of GTA VI didn't inspire an uptick in sales.

Plus, Microsoft skipped out on their mid-cycle refresh so they don't have any good reason to buy something new from them. And nobody, PC or console, has any big upgrades on the horizon. So there's like zero downside to used, because there hasn't been anything extraordinary to replace them.

All Sony and Microsoft had to do was eat the costs. Two years or so. Eat the increased cost of the consoles. They'd have kept loyal customers for life, earned a ton of goodwill, lock in sales for ages. They wouldn't have been unprofitable. They simply wouldn't have been *as* profitable. But nope.

The Steam Machine was doomed based on price alone. It was using parts that even at the entry level were years out of date. It *had* to be $600. But in the end it's really no loss to Valve because claiming an oversized slice of game sales is their bread and butter, not the hardware.

The future of gaming right now is to throw Linux on whatever random piece of hardware you have laying around and run Steam, or be a company like Nintendo that keeps an almost parasocial relationship with its customers. Microsoft and Sony have lost too much ground.

I'd say XBox is doomed before the Playstation, but that's mainly because after the bubble pops Microsoft will have to eat the costs of their association with OpenAI. That means they'll put their entire gaming division out to sea to cut costs. But without a miracle there's no way they survive.