Playstation Played Out?

Darcy Casselman
Tue, 01 Oct 2024 20:00:00 EDT

There's been a shift. I can feel it. Things are changing. Nothing will ever be the same.

A very long time ago, I got a Playstation. Actually, my parents got it for me near the end of my university career when I was generally pretty miserable. I played some games. It was fun.

A few years later, I got a PS2. That died, but I got another one. The second one died in the middle of my Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas play-through.

(I vaguely recall finishing that, but I'm not sure how. I didn't get another PS2, and the PS3 I got didn't have backwards compatibility. I guess I can play it on my phone now...)

(Second aside, I kinda miss my old blog. I definitely miss friends reading along and chiming in on my nonsense. I turned off comments a long time ago, because ugh, but you can always hmu on mastodon...)

I held off a bit on the PS3 because it was stupid expensive at launch. I asked my parents to buy me one for Christmas when they stripped out PS2 support and dropped the price a bit. (I got them a Wii about the same time...).

I held out about a year before buying a PS4, eventually lured by the call of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

I haven't bought a PS5 yet. I've been kind of assuming there would be an attractive mid-gen hardware refresh like the PS3. Or even a game I just needed to play like the PS4. Neither has really happened. The mid-gen hardware refreshes came out, and they introduced a "slim" model that actually raised the price. Then they just announced the PS5 Pro, which is like $1000 and doesn't seem to be that much better.

I've never been that much of a self-declared "gamer" or anything, but getting a Playstation and playing games on it is something I've been doing for a rather long time. And when I switched over to Linux (something like 17 years ago), my whole thing was that it didn't matter that I couldn't play games on my computer. I've got a Playstation for that.

And Nintendo consoles too, but they're kind of a different thing in my head.

The interesting thing is now I can actually play games on my computer. I just did a hardware upgrade on my desktop that has the side benefit that games play really nice now.

Valve, as much as I'm not super-keen on their DRM, has been putting a lot of resources into making sure I can play games on my computer. And I've got a few hundred games in my Steam library already, without even really trying.

So the conclusion I'm rapidly coming to is maybe I'm not a Playstation guy anymore. (And yeah, it feels like an identity thing). And maybe I'll just put the money I'd planned to blow on a PS5 towards a Steamdeck instead.

Featured image is 64/365 PlayStation generation by Ninac26