About the "Console Wars"

I still remember playing both on consoles and PC, and how much they differed from one another (I'm not saying one was necessarily better than the other) given that if you played on a console, you were most likely going to play racing games, 2D or 2.5D fighting games, platformers, or third-person games, while on PC the experience was usually more oriented towards first-person shooters, strategy, and isometric games, such as Diablo II.

2004 was a golden year for all kinds of players, with titles like GTA San Andreas, Gran Turismo 4, or Half-Life 2. Back then, it was much easier to play on a console than on a PC, because if you had a PC (or were poorer and could only use your parents') it was most likely an office machine and didn't have the capacity to run the most demanding video games of the moment, whereas in the case of the console, a more sociable experience (in the sense of sharing a screen with siblings or friends), the catalogue of the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo 64 and GameCube was much broader. During this period, I believe very few people can deny that there was a certain margin regarding sales and value-for-money between the two ways of playing.

Of course, this would not always remain the case, as PCs rapidly evolved, becoming less "exclusive" and encompassing genres and franchises that had never before been available on PC, especially those Japanese titles' franchises like Soul Calibur, Tekken, etc. Naturally, the reverse also happened, with games traditionally associated with the keyboard and mouse being optimized for console. Everyone seemed happy with their device, and the concept of "console wars" didn't really exist at the time. At least, I don't remember it. So, what happened?

As in every commercial war where the consumer contributes a passionate (sentimental) approach, the big corporations look at the numbers. What a businessperson desires, more than anything, is to achieve commercial success and inflict the greatest possible damage on their competitors.

As we established earlier, the PS2's reign was indisputable throughout the early to mid-2000s. However, Bill Gates, who at the time had tried to dethrone the iPod by launching the Zune, met with SEGA, who harboured some resentment towards Sony and Nintendo for their exit from the console market, and together they planned the termination of PlayStation's market dominance. Something they haven't achieved so far, by the way, but which has undoubtedly succeeded in its own right, building a loyal and solid consumer fanbase that, by alternating between major titles like Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, somehow began to compete with Sony's PlayStation, despite the difference in catalogue volume. While Xbox players had those three major titles at their disposal, the PS2 still boasted a myriad of games that never made it to the 360, and which even today force the PC Master Race to use emulators to check, in retrospect, whether those PlayStation 2 titles were really that good or not.

The origin of the "console wars" can be explained by a purely psycho-social phenomenon. As the hype for every new video game was unleashed among classmates in high school, secondary school, the neighbourhood, or university, a certain frustration was often experienced upon confirming how your console (because, except in rare cases, almost everyone had only one, neither two nor much less, three), being as good as it could be, was absolutely useless when it came to playing a title that was exclusive to its rival. The PlayStation couldn't run games like Halo, nor could the Xbox run games like Persona 4, due to the exclusivity of both titles (at least, originally). The feeling of spending so much money, while still young, on a console, and still not being able to play all the games (which were perfectly compatible by hardware, the problem being the licenses) degenerated until it led to what we know today as the "console wars." In reality, it is very simple to understand: your VHS player could reproduce any VHS cassette, and the same would later happen with DVD and Blu-Ray, so why the heck didn't the same happen with consoles, even when the architecture of their hardware was so similar (example: chips supplied by the same company, AMD)? The key, again, resides in exclusivity. 

The reality is that, although it seems ironic, the concept of a fierce defence of exclusivity rights does not originally belong to Sony, nor to Microsoft, but to the "third major company," which is none other than Nintendo. If you wanted to play as Mario, or hunt Pokémon, it was absolutely mandatory that you bought a Nintendo console, whether handheld or home. One would think this was a risky gamble, and it certainly is, but the immense popularity of the Italian plumber and Pikachu carried the company forward. Although they could not compete with Sony in global sales for over a decade, they managed to survive in a way that SEGA, for example, did not (and the same can be said of Atari and the other console manufacturers who withdrew from the market). Nintendo's commercial policy was clear: we have X exclusives, which you can only enjoy on our consoles, and we can also offer you many other titles that will be available for our machines, since (increasingly, as is still the case today) video game development companies understood that porting them to the largest possible number of platforms (including handheld and PC, and now also Android and iOS) would earn them a lot of money. And, of course, money is always the key to understanding any commercial war, even though we, as consumers, see the conflict from a passionate, sentimental point of view, as I said at the beginning. The case of Nintendo is also important because it allows us to demonstrate, as I will do later, that the console wars were not based so much on graphics, as everyone says, but on the exclusivity of the titles. One would think that Nintendo, having produced consoles with less powerful hardware than the PlayStation-Xbox duo in every generation (and this is objective, not a gratuitous attack) should pale in sales, but again, one must take into account the sentimental weight that being able to play with Mario or Ash had (and still has) for many gamers. 

I think we can all agree that one of the most notorious cases in the video game industry regarding the "console wars" was the adaptation of the first Batman games of the Arkham series, with hundreds of thousands of PC users around the world protesting the poor optimization of the game on PC, which they claimed was due to the developers having prioritized the release of the console versions (Xbox and PlayStation), doing a relatively poor job on the PC version. It is around this time that a third player enters the "console wars," and that is precisely the PC as a gaming platform.

Even in the 2000s, everyone had a PC. Or at least, almost everyone. But high-performance gaming PCs did not start to become mainstream until the late 2000s. Until then, the price difference and the still-latent memory of the console controllers' feel in the hands of an entire generation had prevented a more level playing field between desktop PCs and the two major consoles that are still competing with each other today. In a short time, PC users came to the conclusion that it was not worthwhile to invest a minimum of three or four times the amount of money needed for a new PlayStation or Xbox console every five or six years without demonstrating their superiority. In the case of PCs, the graphical advantage over consoles apparently compensated for the problem that many video games traditionally associated with PlayStation (franchises like God of War), to such an extent that it became the perfect weighty reason to discredit anyone who, for economic reasons or by free choice, preferred to continue playing on the Sony console. Notice how I have only mentioned PlayStation, because, at the moment PC gaming became more affordable, it inherited the Xbox's role, given that Xbox titles, save for rare exceptions, always came out for PC. After all, Microsoft wouldn't shoot itself in the foot (the Xbox can be considered the console version of a more affordable gaming PC). This is where a clear competition arises between the PC/Xbox (Microsoft) duo and Sony, which in commercial terms was visible through the continued "war of exclusives," but which in social terms was visible through the tons of memes and YouTube videos where the comments tried, humorously, to denigrate the quality of the PlayStation as a console, based almost exclusively on graphics, even when the comparison was not entirely fair, since for every PlayStation model of the same generation (standardized) an average PC could have any model of NVidia or AMD graphics card within a very broad catalogue, where the diversity was such that, compared to the "almost universal model" of consoles of the same brand, it was practically impossible to compare two gaming PCs as their components would rarely coincide in model, or even in brand.

PC players would rarely vocally attack the Xbox, among other reasons, because belonging to a company that was integrated with PC (after all, a product that uses the Windows OS) they did not consider it an adversary platform, given that PlayStation exclusives were still far from being played on PC. Again, the frustration of not being able to play titles like Heavy Rain or The Last of Us was settled in every meme or YouTube video where the "useless" PlayStation 4 had graphics of "a 2010 PC," and things like that. In recent times, Sony (a Japanese company, at least in origin, which is now multinational) was even accused of having "introduced wokeism" into video games, when the reality is that every single title of this style was American or European, demonstrating once again the degree of hostility the PlayStation received, at least in popular culture (memes and the internet). Of course, PlayStation players were no more to blame for PC/Xbox players not being able to enjoy these titles (until recently) than by the mere fact of continuing to buy the Sony console, a company whose policy was changing over time. Is anyone surprised that the "console wars" ended at the exact moment when a PlayStation owner can play Forza Horizon, and a PC/Xbox owner can play Tekken or Horizon Zero Dawn? And naturally, the fact that Xbox and PC players have been more aggressive towards PlayStation players than the latter towards the former is only because Sony's platform had the most exclusives until recently... although things have changed.

As PC gaming continues to evolve, with the prices of graphics cards and the games themselves falling and the concept of "exclusives" losing more and more strength (except for Nintendo, although as the saying goes “never say never”) Sony itself finds itself at a crossroads where its business model is clearly threatened, especially now that Xbox and Steam stores are highly compatible with each other (as evidenced by their ambivalent presence on cloud gaming platforms like Nvidia Geforce Now or Boosteroid), and one wonders whether they will insist on developing an increasingly powerful console, to compete with the average keyboard and mouse experience, or whether, just like SEGA, they will end up accepting defeat in terms of hardware and, using the capital saved by this investment, will focus solely on video game development, something they have been doing successfully for decades, or will they try to compete in cloud gaming or VR, the future of video games? Only time will tell.