bug_of_war said:
The way it's going, most companies would have to have huge balls to dive in. The Ouya has pretty much disappeared, the Steam Box isn't even something casual gamers are aware of, the fact that gaming has gotten so expensive that the Wii U is relying almost solely on first party games to sell itself due to bigger companies not seeing the value in porting games over to them. Right now it's really not looking like a good place to jump into, and the very fact that we really only have 3 home consoles shows that companies are too scared to jump in. There are roughly 10 ways we can watch film and television, 4 or 5 ways in which we can listen to music, yet it's becoming very clear that if you wanna play a majority of games on a console, you really only have 2 options.
I wouldn't hold Ouya or Steam Machines against the console market. Both are poorly conceived. I'll grant some utility to the Steam Machine, but it's been struggling to find an identity and even Valve doesn't seem to know who it's for. Speaking of Valve, thanks to Valve Time, it's a logistical nightmare to put them out as advertised, and you've got units shipping without the controller.
Ouya's just a dumb idea. I mean, I could see a market for non-portable Android games I guess, but most of what they did was try and adopt the mobile games to a non-mobile device, completely defeating 90% of the appeal. Considering I can use my phone (Which I needed in the first place, and will have to upgrade at least every few years anyway) on a TV, use a bluetooth controller already, and still game portably when I want? Meh.
Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft just managed one of the best console launches in history, without much in the way of actual games or anything. Even if MS got relatively spanked, it still sold a lot of units. As did Nintendo, whose biggest problem was falling short of their prediction of a bazillion units sold. We've seen some of the biggest record sales of games in the last cycle, including GTA V on eight year old hardware.
The only way I see this changing is if a console manufacturer leaves the market because the market itself becomes too toxic. In that case, monopolies don't matter, they're probably all fucked.
There is also the possibility that the console market itself loses steam, but that hasn't happened yet, despite the now decades-old claim that the last gen was nigh. And honestly, any sea change that kills the console market is likely to also kill PC gaming as we know it. That probably upset a few people with unrealistic expectations or perhaps even a tribalist attitude, but it's realistic. There will pretty much always be a market for a simplified gaming system. There will always be a sizable chunk of people who want to game on their couch and can't be arsed with a gaming PC. That changes if the concept of a PC changes, and pretty much only then.
