With a long lifespan, it’s easy to forget just how popular dedicated consoles can be, particularly in recent years with the rise of esports fuelling the PC platform and showing just how successful online streaming and content creation is particularly for new releases, and newer hardware giving cutting edge performance. Similarly, mobile gaming has found its own footing as changing attitudes toward gaming have meant a newer demographic not typically known for gaming have found their own gaming home. Particularly this past year as online services such as online gambling and mobile casinos were able find surges of new players throughout the year as online alternatives became more popular whilst offline alternatives remain unavailable. Despite all that, the big success stories of the year come for both Sony and Microsoft as the newest dedicated consoles appear to be a huge resounding success and reinvigorated the dedicated console market. A similar trend was also seen across sports betting platforms, such as those found at TwinSpires. These offered bonuses, which were picked up by fans throughout the year.
Both new consoles have received huge hardware upgrades – but the most impactful may come through the storage infrastructure which had been a bit of an Achilles heel when compared with modern gaming PC’s which have access to newer solid state and NVME drives which operate much faster, with the changes to the dedicated console storage architecture they are now also able to benefit from these much faster speeds. Improvements to the graphic and processing power also mean that these new consoles can display games much better too – with most running at a standardised sixty frames per second, instead of the older thirty frames per second, which definitely helps bridge the gap between consoles and the PC market.
Although both of the newer consoles sold extremely well, to the point that if you didn’t pre-order early you’ll be unlikely to get your hands on one for another month or two, and older console quietly outsold both in the background and has kept another dedicated console market alive and well – the Nintendo Switch. Whilst the handheld market hasn’t really been the same since the advent of the modern smartphone and the gaming market that has come along with them, the Switch has moved from strength to strength being the most sold gaming console, now at over 63 million sales just three years after its release date.
Either way it’s a very strong look for the dedicated console market as a whole, with the life expectancy of these newer models to match what the older models could do they will still be with us for a while yet and fans that haven’t been able to pick one up will have plenty of time to do so, with newer hardware features however the future of gaming is certainly looking exciting, and given developers have been known to push these consoles to their limits time after time, it will be exciting to see what’s possible in the coming years when development methods progress and newer titles start to really test what the new hardware can do.
