The console wars are back and worse than ever

digitaltrends.com:

When I was a kid, I was a soldier for Nintendo. I was fiercely loyal to the Nintendo GameCube, so much so that I was visibly angry when my parents pranked me on Christmas by pretending they were giving me an Xbox instead. It was a criminal offense in the heat of the console wars.

“Console war” is a term widely used to describe competition between game console manufacturers. It became a household phrase when the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis went to war for TV supremacy. Sega famously ran ads taking direct shots at Nintendo, saying “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.” That heated competition was present through multiple console generations and especially heated up when it became a three-way race among Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

Today, most level-headed gamers would tell you that the console wars largely ended by the 2010s. Nintendo broke off into its own niche, while Sony and Microsoft started learning how to play nice via cross-platform support. Even with ardent loyalists hanging out in their Twitter foxholes, the world had learned that multiple consoles could peacefully coexist.

That changed this week. Microsoft’s announcement that it plans to acquire Activision Blizzard is the shot heard ’round the world. It’s an aggressive move that signals Console World War II is imminent — and this time, the stakes are much higher.

The first iteration of the “console wars” was tame by today’s standards. For the most part, it heavily revolved around exclusive games. Consoles were defined by how good their first-party libraries were, which gave fans a quantitative metric to measure a system’s success. When a console landed a third-party exclusive, it was lauded as an existential win, showing how strong one company’s pull was.

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