90s. Sega and Nintendo are neck and neck in video game and console sales. If one has Sonic, the other has Mario. If one releases the Game Boy, they counter with the Game Gear a year later. If Sega launched the Mega Drive, Nintendo did the same with ‘Super Mario Bros 3’ and, months later, with the Super Nintendo. The swords were constantly raised and exclusives were vital to win a war that defined the gaming audience of that decade. Thirty years later, still talking about “console wars” is simply… ridiculous.
Watered War
The battle in the mid-90s was for exclusive games: Mega Drive had ‘Sonic’, ‘Altered beast’ and its own version of ‘Aladdin’ while Nintendo stood up to it with, of course, ‘Super Mario World’, ‘Donkey Kong Country’, ‘Super Mario Kart’ or… its own version of ‘Aladdin’. Nowadays, exclusives no longer define a console: not only do most games end up being multiplatform, but the same companies… don’t even compete with each other.
In the past, being a Nintendo or Sega fan implied a certain personality. The child against the adult, the popular or the underground. The one who knows what is good. However, what does it mean to “be an Xbox fan”? And “be a PlayStation fan” or “be a Nintendo fan”? Nothing. Emptiness. Absurd shouts about Twitch. These are absurd and meaningless childish fights between platforms that don’t even seek confrontation. PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series each play their own game, regardless of what the others do.
Nintendo is not trying to compete with Sony, but Microsoft is also doing its own thing with Game Pass and creating a catalog based on big hits. It’s not a war, not even a tense calm: each one goes about its business, knowing that, except in the case of the big N, their success or failure does not determine the future of the company: Microsoft and Sony have their video game departments, yes, but they are not, by any means, the center of their companies. If tomorrow Microsoft decides that it’s over for Xbox, it won’t go bankrupt. And that’s why there’s no need for a war.
In order for there to be a “console war”, there must be companies that need the consoles to survive, forced to fight not only to have more benefits than the other, but to be the one that remains standing. Taking the fanaticism for a controller or an operating system to the limits of madness, in 2024, it goes beyond ridiculous. There is no war: there are only soldiers loose in search of a nonexistent conflict.
