Openness is great, but there’s no financial reason to make specialized hardware to operate an open platform.
Historically, consoles have been sold near cost, and profits have been made on game sales after the fact. If you can just buy your games from Steam on console, the price of the console will go up. At some point, it no longer makes sense to buy the specialized hardware.
But we’ll get to see how that goes! It’s looking more and more like the next Xbox is going to run Windows.
We’re already seeing some of that with things like the ROG Ally. There are also specialized emulator platforms that can play cartridges from multiple consoles.
Openness is great, but there’s no financial reason to make specialized hardware to operate an open platform.
Historically, consoles have been sold near cost, and profits have been made on game sales after the fact. If you can just buy your games from Steam on console, the price of the console will go up. At some point, it no longer makes sense to buy the specialized hardware.
But we’ll get to see how that goes! It’s looking more and more like the next Xbox is going to run Windows.
We’re already seeing some of that with things like the ROG Ally. There are also specialized emulator platforms that can play cartridges from multiple consoles.
Yup, and the price of the Xbox Ally is ridiculous, as expected!