The Console War is OVER
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Is the console war finally over?
Is the console war finally over? For decades, consoles have been battling it out for market supremacy. We've seen companies join in the war and others fall to the wayside. And now, another newcomer has joined the fray, Valve. Some people think the Steam Machine truly marks the end of the console war, finally proving the PC Master Race was always the top dog. But is that really the case? Is this the end of the console war? Or actually, is this the next phase as these companies find more ways to empty our wallets? Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's ready to stop seeing Twitter threads about which console is better. Ah, who am I kidding, that's never gonna stop, it's Twitter. But we do seem to be at a major turning point for this so-called console war.
The console wars have been going on since home gaming systems were invented, but in August 2025 we saw what appeared to be the beginning of the end, with PlayStation exclusive Helldivers becoming available on Xbox and Xbox exclusive Gears of War coming to PlayStation. This, along with Xbox's move away from consoles and more into Game Pass, allowing people to play Xbox games on PC, and PlayStation also releasing their exclusives on PC with potential plans for same-day cross-platform releases, really made it feel like this was the end. Just look at the amount of videos made on the topic. But the real nail in the coffin was Valve showing up in November to announce their own home console. Oh, this is the new Steam machine.
That's right, Valve, the owners of digital gaming superstore Steam and developers of the cult classic games like Portal and Half-Life are finally launching a gaming console of their own. Now you would be able to play all your PC games as well as all of those console games being ported over to PC from the comfort of your own couch. So does this mean the console war is truly over? Is the Steam machine the nuke to end this multi-generational conversation? Or is there more to this? Well, theorists, you're watching this channel, so the answer is obviously yes. This end to the console war may not be so cut and dry, but to figure it out, we have to take a look back through history in order to understand what these console wars truly were, how the times affected how they were fought, and what that means for us in the future.
In September of 1972, the first ever home gaming console was released, the Magnavox Odyssey. The games you could play on this thing were incredibly basic and required you to put a physical overlay onto your screen to make any sense of it. In fact, some games even came with essentially whole board games to supplement what was happening on the TV. But as the 1970s marched on, slowly but surely, consoles started getting better. Other systems released like the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, Intellivision and many more. This not only proved the home console market was viable, but with this being a very new medium, whoever could win the market would essentially be the one to decide what a home console was, what audiences should expect from the experience, what controllers looked like and how the medium would advance going forward.
And thus the console wars began. sort of. It wasn't exactly a war, more like a spirited debate at a boring dinner party. I mean, just listen to this guy. This sort of competition is usually great for consumers. It causes different corporations to compete with each other, always striving to make the best product. And it totally worked. The gameplay became more intricate, the controls were more fluid and the graphics went way up. I mean, just look at the difference in quality between the Odyssey that came out in 1972 and the Intellivision that came out in 1979. That's just a 7 year difference and they went from just 3 pixels to 15,360, which is an insane leap. Plus it was literally impossible to program games for more than one system at a time.
If you wanted to have a game on multiple consoles, you would have to start the game from scratch. scratch each time a new port came out.
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