Let's take a look at advantages console gaming has offered and see if any of these are going to remain
0. Better hardware/$
1. Convenience.
2. Optimized for gaming in the living room.
3. Physical media still widely available.
4. Harder to cheat in competitive gaming
5. Being able to optimize games for a specific system.
6. Not having the operating system take up resources while gaming.
6 hasn't been true since the wii, after that consoles have had wasteful operating system (even morse wasteful than windows 10).
Due to APIs such as Vulkan and Direct X 12 consoles no longer offer much of an advantage when it comes to optimization for specific hardware. Furthermore making the game for specific hardware creates the issue of the game not being able to utilize future better hardware well, we see this a lot with games made for PS4/xbone, PS5 end up having to emulate the old inferior hardware to play these games (which it does well but still not ideal).
There is less of a point to physical media today on PC since people have a lot more freedom there. Almost all games are easy to pirate on PC and we are not looked to specific services. Furthermore increasingly the version of a game that is on a disk will typically end up obsolete quickly as a game is updated. Physical media just isn't very practical today due to games being released unfinished most of the time.
0. Better hardware/$
1. Convenience.
2. Optimized for gaming in the living room.
3. Physical media still widely available.
4. Harder to cheat in competitive gaming
5. Being able to optimize games for a specific system.
6. Not having the operating system take up resources while gaming.
6 hasn't been true since the wii, after that consoles have had wasteful operating system (even morse wasteful than windows 10).
Due to APIs such as Vulkan and Direct X 12 consoles no longer offer much of an advantage when it comes to optimization for specific hardware. Furthermore making the game for specific hardware creates the issue of the game not being able to utilize future better hardware well, we see this a lot with games made for PS4/xbone, PS5 end up having to emulate the old inferior hardware to play these games (which it does well but still not ideal).
There is less of a point to physical media today on PC since people have a lot more freedom there. Almost all games are easy to pirate on PC and we are not looked to specific services. Furthermore increasingly the version of a game that is on a disk will typically end up obsolete quickly as a game is updated. Physical media just isn't very practical today due to games being released unfinished most of the time.