Yeah, but now you can buy a PC and pay an xbox subscription. Isn't this exciting, everybody?

Death of the “platform” as in dedicated hardware designed purely to play games.

Going forward “Xbox” games will just be Windows games.

So yes by my definition, it’s dead as dead as Elvis …

Is anything in the tech world interesting or good any more?

Steam Machine?

I've been enjoying the advances in escape room games. mc2games makes some good ones.

The HL2 VR mods are pretty good if you have a headset. Reloading a gun with your physical hands is pretty immersive.

There's been a silent rise in mystery-themed (Ace Attorney adjacent) games in the East recently. The mysteries get better and better.

Russian games have been innovating a bit to attract Western customers. "No I'm not Human" is one of those. There are also some Russian visual novels that are good thrillers.

Of the games China makes that aren't gachaslop, some have tried to innovate. This one syncs what the character doing with real world time. So if it would take 10 minutes for a character to do something, it would take 10 actual minutes. The game doesn't even have to be on during those 10 minutes, so it can be something where you check in every now and then.

Handheld emulation devices

Imagine a non-FOSS time machine

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I still tune into TechQuickie every once in awhile and I noted how start the difference is between shows like that today and five years ago. All news is bad news anymore.

Once we created standards to create everything we see today it became to expensive to invest in alternative home grown solutions. Sadly with the focus of maximizing profit over innovation most ideas just revolve around the existing infrastructure in place to do what they want. I hate it as well and everything feels very stagnant.

Steam EVA Unit is my pick.

Yeah it can be , and Steam already did it and better. But it’s still not a console experience. It’s closer but it’s not equivalent. And for what Xbox has represented this isn’t it …

To me there is some value in having a true console experience. Put a disc in you know it works. Download a game and it plays as good as you can.

Even with Steam Deck you can download games that won’t work or won’t work well.

A lot of people don’t have the patience for that. And so long as consoles can stay under the PC equivalent price I think there will be value.

Consoles meant something back when commodity PC hardware was not good at playing games - at least not for a consumer-accessible price.

The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).

You don’t need that anymore though, a PC can do it all. You don’t even need to be on a specific OS anymore for most games.

Form factor or other novel hardware is going to be the only thing anyone can do; I think this is why Nintendo didn’t bother to make a behemoth console and try to compete with PS5