Sony's results show the rewards of diversification | Opinion
We all know, at this stage, that rumours of the death of the console were greatly exaggerated. This narrative took hold pretty strongly for about a decade, fuelled by the introduction of various smart devices – smartphones, smart TVs, and so on – and by some fairly optimistic notions about 5G and internet speeds in general.
The logic was simple; the world was filling up with devices that you could play games on, and with the potential for streaming games in ways that didn't require a device at all looming on the horizon, selling consumers an expensive, dedicated gaming console seemed like a tougher prospect with every passing day. Even as each successive generation of console hardware boomed, confident prophets told us that decline into irrelevance was inevitable for this sector.
Ultimately, those people who predicted the end of consoles were wrong (so far, at least) for a very simple reason: they didn't actually understand the appeal of consoles in the first place.
If you posit that a console is simply a piece of hardware dedicated to playing games, then yes, the continued existence and even rude health of this sector in a world of high-end smartphones, iPads, laptops, and various other devices quite capable of playing decent-quality games is a mystery. This framing, however, underestimates the value of console hardware – the effort and engineering that goes into building a dedicated device that it's fun and pleasurable to play games on, a thousand decisions small and large that make the experience seamless, smooth, and enjoyable, and which many consumers value immensely even if they could not specify precisely what those differences are.
It also completely misunderstands what a console actually is: not a commoditised piece of hardware fired into the market and forgotten, but the centre of an ecosystem of software, services, development studios, licensing, and marketing, which makes something like PlayStation into a business, a brand, not just a curvy box of
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