For decades gamers everywhere have had the same old arguments of which console is better between competing machines. The most famous of these was the Super Nintendo against the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. This is characterised by kids arguing in playgrounds and discussion of ‘blast processing’ number of bits and the wonders of the Super FX chip.
In more recent years the frequent battle is usually over the various generations of the PlayStation vs the Microsoft Xbox consoles. Arguments are no longer just restricted to kids in playgrounds however as that same generation allow the argument to grow up with them and message boards, chat rooms and eventually social media would be the battleground for discussing polygons and terrflops.
But here’s the thing. The amount of so called “power” a console has is pretty much irrelevant. That may seem a strong word, but I use it because history has demonstrated such at almost every turn and today we’ll break this down. If you didn’t know, its been the case that between peer consoles the most powerful one pretty much never wins.
Before we get to the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo we’ll begin at the era in which Atari was the king of the console ring. The Atari VCS (not the modern one of the same name) which would later be known as the Atari 2600 was most successful console of it’s era. This was despite that the Intellivision and Colecovision were both more powerful consoles.
In these earliest days of the console wars it was the Atari that hits the market first and with console gaming with interchangeable carts being a new idea people looked to Atari who made Pong as the trusted brand to get behind. Of course, the rarely spoken about Fairchild Channel F predated the Atari 2600 and didn’t do as well as the Atari, but that doesn’t disprove the theory.
The Fairchild was released in 1977 and it was such early days for games consoles that there were no rules for how to make a console a success. That is where the more powerful Atari came in and cleaned. With a couple of years head start before Intellivision came out people got used to the idea that Atari basically meant video games. You have to remember that this was an era where parents didn’t understand the concept that as technology improved it would mean that if their children were gamers they’d have to invest in a new home console every four to six years.
But still, the more powerful Intellivision and later released Collecovision were unable to topple the success of the Atari 2600. Of course, it is worth noting that at this time the US video game market crashed due to a number of factors such as too many choices for consoles and that the quality of software was often poor. If this hadn’t happened then maybe the more powerful competition would have won out the day, but we have no way to know, and as we’ll see from the upcoming examples it was less than likely.
Next up on the menu for discovery is the Nintendo Entertainment System against it’s rivals. The NES first released in Japan as the Famicom and it would be the most successful video game console for years to come. It’s main rival was the Sega Master System and also worth a mention was the PC Engine. What most people don’t realise is that the Master System as we got it in the west was actually the third iteration of the console in Japan, and that it’s first version, the SG1000 was released on the exact same day as the Famicom in Japan.
Sega’s efforts were more powerful and Sega would lean on their arcade games for success, but the Famicom and the NES were able to easily win most places around the world. Of course, many of you will be familiar with the fact that the Master System was a strong contender and possibly outsold the NES in Europe and the UK in particular, and then there is Brazil. In Brazil the Master System pretty much was console gaming for decades due to other systems not getting a release there and the local company TecToy licencing the console to release there.
But what about power? When you look at Master System games next to equivalents on the NES it’s as clear as anything that the Master System is capable of more advanced graphics. Better sound too. The best Master System games can sometimes fool you to believe they’re early Mega Drive games and the Master System would eventually get the likes of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3 (in Brazil at least). So why did the NES win?
Surely gamers wanted power and better graphics? Of course, but in this instance it comes down to games. All the power in the world doesn’t matter if the better games are on the other system. Some may think this will be the argument for every following console generation we’ll look at, but oh no, it’s not always that simple.
If the Atari had got a foothold with a significant head start, we can look at the NES vs Master System and say it was about the games. There were good games on the Master System like Outrun, Altered Beast, Alex Kidd and eventually Sonic the Hedgehog, but Nintendo was able to get a better library of games earlier in the consoles lifespan. Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, the Legend of Zelda, Metroid and the list goes on. Add to this that Nintendo were very aware of the effects that bad quality games could have on a consoles chances and so they introduced the Nintendo Seal of Quality and made it so that games developers would have to pay a license fee for producing games on the NES.
Nintendo wouldn’t let games makers put out unlimited amounts of games and especially if they didn’t meet their standards. This didn’t mean that every game was a triple A release but it meant that bad games couldn’t flood the market. Oh, and Nintendo also wouldn’t let developers put out the same games on rival systems if they wanted to also be on the NES. This was Nintendo having a monopoly but in the world of business this was a checkmate move.
Of course, Nintendo could only enforce this for so long, but it is the reason why even games with the same name on both the NES and Master System would be completely different games. Eventually the competition would grow enough so Nintendo would have to give up on this, but it’s a main reason why the lesser powered NES was able to stay ahead of the Master System.
Now we’re reaching the big boys. The real deal. The rivalry to top them all. The Super Nintendo vs the Sega Mega Drive. Now, just to make my position on this clear, the Super Nintendo was clearly the more powerful system. It released two whole years after the Mega Drive and although the consoles could produce pretty much the same games as each other, the SNES definitely edges it out. For me the main way this was evident was with the sound. The Mega Drive had a unique sound quality, but when you hear the same game across both systems the SNES wins for me.
Also, when you look at games that were on both I’d say the SNES wins. But of course its not always quite so simple. Blast processing was mostly nonsense but may have referred to some aspect of the Mega Drive’s architecture, and there may have been something the Sega console ran faster or smoother. A great example I look to is WrestleMania the Arcade Game. The graphics to me always looked better on the SNES. That said I do take note that the Mega Drive version included the superheavyweight characters that were cut on the SNES. Was it because the SNES couldn’t handle something the Mega Drive could?
As I know this is the most debatable comparison we’ll cover in this discussion I’ll let you all decide which side of the fence you fall upon. You’ll either agree with me that the SNES was more powerful and therefore see that as the SNES sold more units worldwide that it somewhat disapproves my theory, or you’ll think the Mega Drive was more powerful and in which case it continues to prove my point. For my purposes I’d argue that clearly I must really believe that the SNES was the more powerful or I wouldn’t sabotage my own argument like this.
But here’s the thing…and you may have guessed that a thing was coming. The SNES and Mage Drive weren’t the only consoles of the generation. The fourth console generation as this era was known was the last of the generations where every tech company just figured they wanted to pile into the home console market and as such there were lots of other contenders. And yes, generally speaking they were more powerful than either the SNES or Mega Drive.
The PC Engine AKA the Turbo Grafx-16 bridged the gap between NES and Super NES generations and wasn’t as powerful, but the CD-i, the Neo Geo, also bridging the gap to the next generation were the Atari Jaguar, and 3DO. These latter two are counted as part of the fifth console generation if you read Wikipedia, but they came along and were all but wiped out by the SNES and Mega Drive so I would say that even if generationally they were a step towards what would come they competed in the same generation as the SNES and Mega Drive.
And so once again I’ll defend my position in the argument I am making. Even if we were to count the 3DO and Jaguar alongside the likes of the Saturn, PlayStation and N64, it isn’t that I said that the weakest console wins. It’s that the strongest doesn’t. So if we count that the Jag and the 3DO along with the Amiga CD32, CD-i and Neo Geo were all peers competing at the same time then it is clear that the SNES, which won this generation narrowly over the Mega Drive, wasn’t the most powerful. This said I am willing to simplify the generation down to the SNES and Mega Drive as the only real consoles to have any degree of meaningful success and say that in this instance the more powerul, if only by a nat’s hair won.
Coming back to the aforementioned Saturn, PlayStation and N64 things become quite simple for the discussion. The N64 was more powerful than the PlayStation and Saturn. Whether the Jaguar should count as a 64-bit system along with the N64 is irrelevant as the PlayStation obliterated the competition…combined.
You can make the argument that the debate on which console is more powerful can have many fronts. The PlayStation and Saturn used CDs which held more data than the carts of the N64. Hence they have an advantage here. Isn’t strictly power, but was all part of the playground points of debate. It’s also possible that in a few areas the PlayStation may have had advantages. Textures is a prime example as the N64 wasn’t capable in this area. The Saturn definitely was a console designed more for 2D games than either of the others.
So, what can we learn from this? How was the 32-bit PlayStation able to dominate over the 64-bit Nintendo offering. Again this was down to multiple factors.
The N64 wasn’t out until 1996 and 1997 in the UK so the Saturn and PlayStation had literal years head start over them to build a user base and games library. The use of CDs also meant games could be bigger than on the N64 and much cheaper to consumers to buy.
But here’s a theme that we will now uncover that often will be the main factor in a more powerful console losing. Multiplatform games will be designed around the weaker console. If a games developer is making a game, they’ll want to put it out on every console possible to maximise their chances of making the most money possible.
If they designed a game around the Nintendo 64 so it made the absolute best use of the Nintendo hardware it quite possibly wouldn’t have been possible to make a PlayStation or Saturn version. So, what is the solution to this? Design the game around the PlayStation as it had the largest install base of users and then put basically the same version on the N64. To use an obvious example, the N64 would have been able to run Super Mario Bros, but the NES wouldn’t have been able to run Super Mario 64. If you needed to release one of those games on both systems the only choice would be to release the less demanding game on both.
There were many games that released on both N64 and PlayStation, but fewer that released across those two plus Saturn. The Saturn was the least capable with 3D graphics and due to hardware design choices was more tricky to make games for. The result was the Saturn got left behind.
When we look at games that released for both PSOne and N64 the N64 was pretty much always seen as the version with better graphics, but you’d sometimes have cut content on the N64 due to lack of storage space on cartridges. So, video cutscenes and sound was often worse on N64.
The weaker PlayStation dominated the generation, but before it’s quite over in this round we should mention another console that bridges a gap. The Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast is the successor to the Saturn and like the Jaguar could be argued to be in two different generations. For most people the Dreamcast is the forgotten start to the sixth generation of consoles, but that is because it was long since dead by the time of the arrival of the GameCube and Xbox. The Dreamcast only crossed over with the PS2 for a few months worldwide before Sega threw the towel in, and as such for almost the entire run of the Dreamcast it competed with the N64 and PlayStation with the Saturn as a distant memory.
If we were to count the Dreamcast as the 128-but rival to the original 32-bit PlayStation then it would further highlight that power meant nothing to Sega’s fortunes to defeat the Sony console.
Going into the next gen, the Dreamcast did mostly tangle with the N64 and PlayStation and as such multiplatform games that came out still came to the PSOne even if there were better looking versions on the Dreamcast. In this instance it may have been Sega’s mistake to launch early which forced multiplatform games to stay at a vague PSOne level even on Dreamcast. Sure, they looked better on Dreamcast, but they were undoubtably still based on PlayStation games, and therefore once again the weaker console with the higher install base gimped the chances of the more powerful system.
I’d say for people to look at Tomb Raider the Last Revelation and Tomb Raider Chronicles on the Dreamcast as clearly they are better looking games on the Sega console, but in no way do they come across like they are making the most of the Dreamcast. Look at the difference between Dino Crisis on the Dreamcast and Resident Evil Code Veronica to see how a game made specifically for the Sega console could go far beyond what the PlayStation could do.
As a result of the power discrepancy meaning developers had to make a choice they mostly chose to focus on PlayStation and made the Dreamcast game just a higher resolution version.
Another factor is Sony timed the release of the Dreamcast with their announcement of the PlayStation 2. In this instance we can look to Sony as boasting that the PlayStation 2 would be significantly more powerful, have backwards compatibility with the PSOne and also be a DVD player are a three strike attack of power that won over a lot of gamers.
If the battle of this generation were as simple as Dreamcast vs PS2 then it would be power wins hands down. It was not this simple though. The Dreamcast never really got to reach it’s full potential as so many of it’s games were hi-res PSOne games. We never really got to see if the Dreamcast would have meant that PS2 games were held back to be at Dreamcast level in the same way. Sega were hurting for money and had to make the decision to exit the console wars when they did or they would have ceased to exist in total. If Sega could have lasted the entire generation would the Dreamcast have suffered being left behind as the Saturn was or would have games released across all four competing platforms?
It’s hard to tell, but I suspect the former. The Dreamcast was powerful, but the GameCube was more powerful than the PS2 and the Xbox more powerful than the Cube. I think the reported difference between the consoles at the time was that the Dreamcast could have three million polygons on screen at once whilst the Xbox was advertised as able to do something insane for the time like 118 million. I forget if that was the precise number they said, but the reality is the difference wasn’t that huge. The Dreamcast’s number related to what you’d realistically have in a game that was running, but the Xbox number what if you literally just ran the polygons without literally anything else to make it run as a game. In practice though the Xbox maybe had 18-20 million at once.
The polygon count became the new bit-wars which after this generation stopped getting mentioned at all. But would have developers made games for both Xbox and Dreamcast with the Xbox and GameCube never living up to their potential just so the Dreamcast could still get versions of games? I speculate not, but the difference between the PS2 and Xbox did probably mean the Xbox didn’t get as pretty a version of multiplatform games as possible because of the PS2.
Without question the Xbox was most powerful, but it did not win. Maybe the fact the Xbox was the first Microsoft console meant people didn’t jump on the bandwagon, but that doesn’t make sense on it’s own. The PlayStation was the first console from Sony and yet everyone embraced that. Also so many people had Windows PCs so it’s not like Microsoft was unknown to them.
The Xbox was a US made system where as for the previous two generations all console gaming had been dominated by the Japan based Sony, Nintendo and Sega. Certainly this may have affected thing in Japan, but worldwide?
And yes the PS2 had a significant head start over the others, but this was perhaps the console generation where the inclusion of DVD player and backwards compatibility was uber important. These days I don’t think people care that much that the Nintendo Switch can’t have Netflix on it. People have moved on in caring because everyone has ten devices that can connect to Netflix. The same couldn’t be said for past generations when it came to DVD and later Blu-Ray. When people bought a PS2 they were also getting a DVD player and could continue with their full PSOne console library. This meant they could sell off their PSOne and still keep their favourite games from it to play on PS2.
As you’ll see every generation has a different story for why the most powerful console doesn’t win, but so far it has always been that power doesn’t guarantee success.
The PS2 would be all dominating, and part of their continued success would be about to come from their first failure. The PlayStation 3 would go on to become the most powerful of the next generation. It was fairly on par with Microsoft’s Xbox 360, but the 360 would follow Sega’s example with the Dreamcast and launch first.
With the Xbox 360 out first, the console was slow to receive next gen third party titles with many games just being prettier versions of whatever was coming on the PS2, which again supports the theory that the lowest powered console will dictate the power needed to run games across all systems.
After coming out in 2005 the Xbox 360 was followed by the PS3 in 2006, and like I said it was fairly on par, but generally agreed upon that the PS3 was more powerful. This discrepancy may be in a similar ballpark to how the SNES was more powerful than the Mega Drive. Ultimately the same games would arrive on both.
But…as I’m sure everyone reading this already knows, this is not about whether the Xbox 360 or PS3 was more powerful to determine if the power didn’t guarantee success. And that is because the winner of the generation was Nintendo with the Wii.
This is by far the best example of power not meaning much in the discussion as Nintendo absolutely dominated this generation with their insanely underpowered Wii. It’s extraordinary how this came about in fact.
Legend has it that Nintendo were developing the successor to the GameCube and there was one team working on a console that would have rivalled the PS3, but another team worked on what would eventually release as the Wii.
The Wii, power wise was only marginally more powerful than the GameCube and is generally said to be on the level of the original Xbox, which let us remind ourselves was a peer of the GameCube. Nintendo essentially released the GameCube all over again and won. I mean, how does that make sense? The GameCube sold just over twenty million units, so following that they decided to release the near identically powered hardware and this time it sold 101 million consoles. What?!
You see, Nintendo had an ace up their sleeve. Nintendo got their hands on the motion control technology which was previously offered to Microsoft and possibly Sony as well, but they both didn’t see the potential in it. Third option Nintendo saw so much potential they gambled the entire success of the Wii on it. And it worked.
The Wii was so innovative it took the world by storm. Even Microsoft and Sony had to acknowledge it was impressively. After E3 in 2006 people working for Sony said they were impressed with the Wii, but predicted most people would buy a PS3 first, but then also want a Wii as their second console. A representative for Microsoft similarly said that everyone would want the Xbox 360 as their first choice, but probably get a Wii as a second console. What they unintentionally presented was the notion that whether you bought a PS3 or an Xbox 360, they agreed you would buy a Wii. And this is quite possibly what happened and more people bought a Wii than either of the rivals.
The Wii wasn’t even a console that was in HD. It had no emotion engine and instead was focussed on innovation and games. It didn’t even play DVDs. The PS3 had come with the ability to play the HD Blu-Ray discs, but this format never took off in the same way as DVDs had and even as I’m writing this in 2023 DVDs are still a relevant format and arguably Blue-Rays have never dominated due to streaming services stealing their thunder. The Xbox 360 could play DVDs, but not Blu-Rays. It had an optional HD-DVD Drive you could buy as an add-on. If this had been built into every Xbox 360 it may have changed the fortunes for the HD-DVD format, but neither format ultimately helped their console war efforts.
It’s also worth noting that in the previous generation backwards compatibility had been part of Sony’s show of power, and they attempted it again, but with the huge cost of the PS3 they quickly cut the feature. The 360 could play some original Xbox games and the Wii therefore became the most consistent to offer backwards compatibility as the Wii was compatible with all GameCube games and nearly all accessories…but not the Game Boy Player…soz.
One thing that certainly would have helped the success of the Wii was the PS2. Yes you read that right. The Wii perhaps won and beat Sony because of their own PS2, and in fact also because of their PSP handheld as well.
With the PS2 having sold over 100 million units by the launch of the Wii and PS3 there was a gigantic userbase of PS2 owners who perhaps were hesitant to spend hundreds of dollars on a PS3 or Xbox 260. The Wii was much cheaper, and that certainly helped the low powered Wii succeed as well. But because of it’s popularity the Wii was constantly out of stock and gamers still wanted to be able to buy new games. Luckily for them the PS2 was still getting new games for years after the launch of it’s successor. And part of the reason for this was because of the Wii.
The difference in power between the Wii and it’s rivals was so great that having the same game appear across platforms was impossible. But any game for the Wii could also appear on the PS2 and the PSP for that matter. The only real hurdle would be if the Wii’s motion controls could be translated to work with button inputs on the Sony consoles…which of course they could. This may have meant that some Wii games were slightly downgraded form their true potential to also be able to run on the PS2 and the PSP, but realistically this wasn’t a huge difference.
Game developers found that making games for the PS3 and 360 was much more costly and time consuming than the previous generation, and there was a learning curve to making HD games, but they could pump out games for the combination of PS2, PSP and Wii easily. This meant the Wii had a huge library and with the novelty of the motion controls the Wii would be the preferred format for many.
Nintendo’s use of last generation tech meant their console sold for a profit straight away and their use of innovation to draw people in seemed a winning formula. What happened next however would change the landscape and also put a dent in may argument…perhaps.
Nintendo didn’t learn from Sega or Microsoft’s mistakes and decided to be the first out of the gate into the next console generation. The Wii was starting to really show it’s age and the novelty of motion controls was fading by 2012. So Nintendo announced the Wii U. The successor to the Wii that had an innovative tablet style controller.
Nintendo’s tablet controller was only usable by a single player and therefore fundamentally went against the ‘we’ meaning of the word Wii, and also made the Wii U much more expensive than the Wii.
Nintendo also made the massive error of releasing a second console on the trot that was effectively a generation behind it’s competition. The Wii U was comparable in power to the Xbox 360 and PS3, but because the previous generation had actually lasted longer than past generations it meant that a new console with just the same level of graphics didn’t wow anyone.
The Wii U would finish a miserable failure. In 2014 both Sony and Microsoft would release the PS4 and Xbox One respectively. Both of these were much more powerful than the Wii U.
Perhaps Nintendo hoped that the Wii U being similar in power to the PS3 and 360 would mean more games would see releases across platforms as things had with the Wii and PS2. Instead we had reached a point where this did happen, but instead of including the Wii U, games just released on PS3 and PS4. On Xbox 360 and Xbox One. And yes this meant that games were held back by the need for there to be previous generation versions of games.
Between the PS4 and Xbox One people quickly decided that the PS4 was the more powerful, and finally the curse would be broken because the PS4 would go on to sell the most of this generation!
Of course, there is a little more to this story. People liked the original PlayStation and the PS2. As previously mentioned the success of the PS2 helped support the Wii and Sony also did a lot to drop the ball with the PS3 by making it too expensive, hard to develop for and also didn’t have the buzz of the innovative Wii Remote.
But now it was Nintendo’s time to drop the ball. By releasing a second underpowered console that was too expensive the Wii U fumbled. Nintendo also were now only just learning HD game development and so because of their choice for the Wii to not be HD the company was now six years behind the competition in making HD games and as such there were game droughts.
People often say that the Wii U was DOA as the intro presentation was confusing and failed to excite fans and show the potential of the system and people thought it was a tablet add on for the original Wii. Basically they botched their debut. Fortunately for Sony, so did Microsoft.
When the Xbox One was shown off it became apparent that the console would need to connect to the next regularly or you would lose the ability to play the games you paid for. It would also come with the Xbox Kinect camera whether you wanted to potentially spying on you device or not. This made the console, which was less powerful than the PS4 more expensive by a huge amount, and to top things off players wouldn’t be able to lend friends copies of games. Oh and the name Xbox One was confusing…this was the Xbox Three…but not to be confused with the Xbox Three-sixty…urgh!
So, Sony did stuff to be consumer friendly and had a powerful console with a focus on games players would want. Sony easily won the generation and did so with the most powerful of the generation…right? Well almost, but not quite.
This generation had a mid-generation console refresh with the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X…again a terrible name from Microsoft. The PS4 Pro was more powerful than the standard PS4, but the Xbox One X was more powerful than the PS4 Pro…I don’t think I’d count this as the Xbox being the most powerful in the generation, but facts are facts and the Xbox ended up becoming the most powerful in the generation. And even though people were now measuring power not in colours, bits, polygons, but in teraflops, the more powerful Xbox One X didn’t turn things around for Microsoft. The PS4 was still the more successful even though it was underpowered.
But there is still a twist to this story, and that is once again Nintendo. As has happened a few times in this discussion we have pointed out when console makers send out a console first they more often than not don’t win. Nintendo’s Wii U was such a terror flop that Nintendo would be the first to release a successor many years before their competition. This of course was the Nintendo Switch.
You have to give some credit for Nintendo for supporting the Wii U as long as they did. It was blatantly obvious within twelve months that the Wii U was doomed, but having seen Sega panic after the 32X and Saturn flopped and rush out the Dreamcast, Nintendo held their nerve and one way or another kept going with the Wii U for four years. Yes it was still a short generation and third parties basically gave up after the first year of the Wii U, but Nintendo being stubborn as they are weren’t going to give up on the Wii U.
Nintendo were also stubborn in that they again tried the same tactic in releasing underpowered hardware for the third generation in a row. It worked the first time with the GameCube level of power Wii, but had blown up in their faces with the Xbox 360 level of power in the Wii U.
So Nintendo released the Switch which much like how the Wii took the flop of the GameCube and repackaged it, the Switch took their flop Wii U and repackaged it as the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo’s ace up their sleeve was once again innovation. The Switch was both the successor to the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS. Nintendo could consolidate their development resources and now all they needed to do was make one console a success instead of two.
So here’s the thing. Should the Switch be seen as a competitor to the PS4 and Xbox One, or was it just a very early arrival of the rival to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S? To be honest I feel it is both. Even though it was the follow up and successor to the Wii U in terms of generation, it was absolutely competing with the PS4 and Xbox One.
If we take this into consideration we can say that the Switch is the overall winner of the generation despite being much less powerful than either the PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One or especially the Xbox One X.
At the time of writing the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S have both been out a couple of years, but games are still being made for their predecessors. This is partly down to a lack of supply of the new consoles which in turn is somewhat down to everything 2020 brought to the world. Support for the older generations became a necessity as the newer generation couldn’t be in enough player’s hands to justify letting the past generation end.
The funny thing is that the Xbox Series X is said to be the most powerful when compared to the PS5 but from all available information it would seem that the PS5 is smashing the more powerful console from Microsoft. That doesn’t matter though as the Switch is still hammering them both. Time will tell where this generation ends up and sooner rather than later we should expect Nintendo to announce the follow up to the Switch. Coming a minimum of three years after the PS5 should it be seen as the same or next generation though?
Maybe the blurred lines of console generations are now such that it’s too hard to accurately say when one generation starts and another ends.
I’ve tried to be fair in my examination of this topic and presented alternatives even if it didn’t fully support my argument, but even on the areas I give wiggle room on, I’d still say that there is a pattern where the most powerful games consoles almost if literally never win the console wars they are in. Through this exploration we’ve discovered that the curse of the most powerful console not winning it’s console generation is perhaps less of a curse, but more a series of circumstances that have always seemed to affect things in one direction. Now, I’m not a betting man, but I’d wager than after eight generations of consoles and forty plus years of gaming that at least once within that it would be indisputable that the most powerful console won and hammered all the competition.
You’ll perhaps note that I haven’t really touched on handheld consoles within this and that is intentional as I’ll open that can of worms in another discussion another day. We’ll see if the pattern or curse continues on that front as well, but for now, we can but wait for the day where the most powerful equals the most successful, but be warned. As Spider-Man said ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’
