Hey There👋
Let’s kick off the new year right, with a piece on something that doesn’t get much attention but probably should.
If you’ve been paying attention to gaming hardware lately, something weird is happening. The lines between consoles and PCs are getting blurry; and not by accident.
In the video games industry, we’re seeing a carcinization happen right before us as the two giants; PlayStation and Xbox turn more into actual PCs.
For a long, platform-exclusive games have been the selling point of gaming consoles. People used to buy consoles just to play games from franchises like The Last Of Us, Uncharted, God Of War.
In fact, more than the games, the hardware of these consoles has also started to become just like that of PCs. The newer consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X use the same CPU and GPU architecture as PCs.
It feels that the consoles are fighting for their identity and Microsoft has only made it more obvious as they think of the next Xbox as a PC.
The general trend for AAA gaming appears to be moving towards PCs and as new entrants like Valve enter the market, we’re going to see some exciting shift going forward.
In the midst of this exciting trend, a devastating situation is emerging as the RAM pricing going as far as 400% in just a couple of months.
This exponential increase in RAM prices would have a far-reaching impact on both PCs and consoles going forward, and I’ll touch a little bit on that too in this article.
Here’s an overview of what this article would talk about:
Some history of the earlier consoles and what made them special
Why consoles are converging to PCs
What’s the strategy for the three big players (Sony, Xbox, Nintendo)
How Valve’s entry may shake things up
What the future looks like
When Consoles Were Truly Different
Video Game Consoles are generally divided into generations. This isn’t a definitive list but most people generally agree on it.
The First generation of consoles starts with the likes of Atari 2600, released back in the 1970s. As of 2025, we are on the Ninth generation of consoles.
Covering all of the generations isn’t the point of this article. That’s why we’ll start our discussion with the Sixth generation of consoles that roughly starts from the year 1998.
Note: For each of the console generations, I’m taking the release year as the starting point and the launch of the next generation as the ending point for the previous one.
Sixth Generation of Consoles (1998-2004)
The sixth generation of consoles is when the PlayStation 2, the original Xbox, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube released. All of them were released around late 1990s to early 2000s.
To date, PlayStation 2 is the most sold gaming console with over 160 million units sold. The Xbox was a huge success too selling over 24 million units and this generation is the one that got us classics like HALO, God Of War.
Seventh Generation of Consoles (2005-2011)
This is believed by many to be the best generation. That is because we had some of the best competition from both sides (Sony and Microsoft) that delivered unforgettable experiences.
The seventh generation got us consoles like the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and the gaming catalogue that includes Demon’s Souls, The Last of Us, Gears of War 2, Halo 3, and many more.
Eighth Generation of Consoles (2012-2019)
The eighth generation began in 2012, and is made up of four home video game consoles:
Wii U
PlayStation 4
Xbox One family
Nintendo Switch
On the AAA front, PlayStation 4 was a huge success with classics like Bloodborne, God Of War (2018), Marvel’s Spiderman. The Xbox One was sadly the console that started Xbox’s decline that continues to date.
Console vs PC hardware
Up till the seventh generation, most of the gaming consoles were custom-built devices that had everything from their processor and graphics chips that were specialized.
All the way from early Sega consoles to PS3, most of these consoles had custom processors. The PlayStation 3’s main processor (Cell Broadband Engine) was notorious for being hard to develop games for.
The original Xbox, although used x86, switched to a custom processor architecture (PowerPC) for the Xbox 360 which shifted again to x86 for the Xbox One, that released in 2013 (talk of U-turns :p).
On the PC side, things were pretty simple. Historically, they’ve been only two processor manufacturers, implementing the same x86 processor architecture.
To this day, it holds up. The x86 processor architecture still reigns supreme in the PC space, but tides are turning.
I’m discussing these technical details just to build up the context for the next section.
The point is that gaming consoles historically have been custom devices that were built differently from computers. Their processors, their graphics chips, were very different from PCs.
To sum it up: Consoles weren’t PCs - they were purpose-built machines with unique hardware identities.
Consoles Becoming PCs
The Hardware Side
We just talked about the history of consoles and how they have largely been different from PCs. While that was true for a long time it isn’t the case these days.
Modern consoles, especially the two big ones; Xbox and PlayStation, have shifted this approach and now they’re almost a PC from a hardware perspective.
Starting with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (2013), the hardware has started to look a lot more like that of PCs.
It turns out that both Sony and Microsoft have contracted with AMD to produce their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware.
Both companies are using the same processor design (Zen) and more importantly they use the same Instruction-Set Architecture that is used by PCs (x86).
If you don’t know what Instruction-Set Architecture is, I’ve written a clean blog explaining it in a simple way. You can check it out below:
ARM vs x86 - What You Need to Know
This article is a companion piece to the Tech Made Fun Episode - TMF 020 - PCs Getting Arm'ed Up - Why You Should Care
Using x86 means that the games that developers write for the consoles are relatively easy to port over to PCs because the underlying architecture is the same as PCs.
And that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing Sony exclusive titles make their way to the PC.
Before the PS4 and Xbox One generation, consoles from both sides used custom processors that had completely different processor architecture to PCs.
Not only were they difficult to develop with but also it was a nightmare to port those games over to the consoles. That is part of the reason we still have classics like God Of War 3, still not available on PC to date.
The point is that today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series S/S are fundamentally the same as a PC from a hardware perspective. They use the same CPU architecture that PCs use, they use the same GPU architecture that the PCs use.
But that’s not at all to say that all consoles are now similar to PCs, we still have a big player like Nintendo whose consoles aren’t that similar to a PC.
While the two big console manufacturers have shifted to PC hardware, that isn’t to say that everyone has done that.
In fact Nintendo is a great example of a console manufacturer that uses the ARM architecture for its consoles. Its approach still looks like that of the previous consoles where much of the console is pretty different from a PC.
The Software Story
It looks like the hardware for both PCs and modern consoles is converging. While that’s true, the software side is also in a weird spot.
Back with the earlier consoles, games were primarily developed for specific consoles oftentimes by the game studios owned by console manufacturers. Take Naughty Dog for example, who created the Uncharted and The Last of Us franchise.
The game studios were provided with devkits for the consoles and they had access to the exact specifications of the consoles that they were developing games for.
But these days, a large community of developers (especially indie ones) focus on developing first for the PC and then porting it over to consoles. Previously, the exact opposite used to happen.
Still, many large studios prioritize developing on consoles because that gives them access to a stable hardware platform that they’ve been accustomed to.
Xbox: The Console that Became a PC
The Console That Once Was
Xbox started out as an answer to PlayStation, and Microsoft gave Sony a great run for its money with its two successful consoles; the original Xbox and Xbox 360.
Xbox 360 was Microsoft’s last hit and the console on the hardware side was a true console with custom processor architecture, good exclusives and overall a great package at a good price.
That’s the reason the Xbox 360 sold over 85 million units!
But starting with Xbox One (2013), things began to take a totally different turn, and that too for the worse.
When the two consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) were against each other back in 2013, Xbox One just didn’t have a chance and since then Microsoft has taken a different approach to Xbox as a platform.
Microsoft no longer sees Xbox as a console but rather an extension of Windows. Their Game Pass subscription looks more like the product than the console.
The recent price hikes to Game Pass have also weakened the argument for it which was a strong point for the Xbox platform for quite some time.
Modern Xbox uses PC hardware - It has the same processor architecture and design as a regular PC processor, the story is the same for the GPU and storage.
On the software side too, Xbox uses the Windows kernel and cross-store apps. And the Xbox app on PC also supports many of the Xbox games already taking more of the exclusivity away from the console.
More than anything else, the modern Xbox has a perception problem. It is simply seen as a Windows PC that is somehow limited.
If you strip an Xbox Series console down to its fundamentals, what you’re left with is basically a Windows PC in a console-shaped shell. Microsoft stopped pretending otherwise a while ago.
The current Xbox uses the same x86 architecture. A Windows-like OS. Similar development tools. And increasingly, the same software library.
Game Pass Subscription
With Game Pass, Microsoft made it clear that the real product isn’t the Xbox box sitting under your TV.