Yeah! Everything muat be digital and if someone still wants the box it can just have a paper with a code in it.

I mean who would like to play the single player game about 5 years later when the servers are down?

Right?

Stadia tried it.

The future will be even worse. Have you seen what people have been doing with AI the last couple of weeks. People have decompiled entire games using AI and made PS5 games run on PC natively. Something that took years by multiple devs takes a few days by a single dev with a Claude account. Sony and MS are definitely shitting their pants right now. Their solution will be cloud streaming only consoles.

Honestly, almost every console runs on my PC. Why not just make Microsoft Xbox for Linux?

The hardware now is just an x64 or ARM platform built to a certain spec running a custom OS. Basically, a PC or a tablet or a Mac Mini.

When you look at it that way, the idea of these walled-garden publishers and marketplaces starts to make absolutely zero fucking sense.

The need for consoles is rapidly getting eroded. There's no proprietary hardware, no special sauce, nothing that they can do that a moderately spec'd PC can't do, and often for less money.

Where they still succeed is just being easy enough, that they more-or-less just work predictably with barely more effort than running the updates that it prompts the user to run. And they're fucking all that up with stupid shit like Virtual Gamecards. It's honestly impressive that Nintendo managed to be the straw that broke my fucking back, would've never seen that coming. At least I knew what I was signing up for with GamePass (and they knew exactly why I term'd it when I did).