Are consoles too heavily reliant on always online connections now?

[Nu-Eclipse]

I Can Play Piano (2006)
I Can Play Guitar (2007)
Smart Cycle (2007)

Not really consoles in the conventional sense as we know them, are they?

[speedlolita]

You could say that for 80% of his list.

[QualityChimp]

No of course not!

My two points still stand though:
1. You can play these old consoles 40 years after they were bought.
2. You can't play the new consoles if you bought them today, let alone in 40 years time!

[Team Andromeda]

All it takes is a bad financial year, a hack of a different division by North Korea or a string of expensive hardware u-turns and they might be out the game.

Think you're going OTT. As long as there's money to be made they'll be corps making consoles. We've had one of the worst crashes in living memory and yet SONY and MS are enjoying bumber sales way ahead of that of the previous generation. Sure the network going down is pain, but one can still play and use the PS4 with out the network

[speedlolita]

To use the term crash at all is ridiculous.

[QualityChimp]

I once laughed at a kid at school when he lied that he had Sonic for his Game Boy as I thought you'd never get a Sega game on a Nintendo console.

I just posted a big list of big names that all dropped out of the console race, but if Sega can fail, anyone can, so don't be thinking today's trio of console manufacturers are invulnerable.

I just think you should be able to play single-player games without needing an internet connection and games should be functional out of the box and not be, as others have said, "coasters" without an update.

[speedlolita]

The difference here is that Sega wasn't a successful company. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have cash in the bank, unlike Sega, which only had Shenmue.

[Team Andromeda]

To use the term crash at all is ridiculous.

Financial crisis any better

[QualityChimp]

Sega wasn't a successful company.

I think that's a little unfair!

[Team Andromeda]

T. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have cash in the bank

Cash in the bank dones't help . NEC , Mattel and Philips had millions in the bank and it didn't help their consoles , SONY have very little left in the bank, but they have a console people want to buy - that's the key people buying your consoles

[fishbowlhead]

I questioned the xbox one on release in that it didn't even work at all until it was updated. It was a brick out the box.

I wonder how many people took it back not realising it needed to be updated? It's crap like this I find totally unacceptable.


Edit. At quality chimp, sega was always on the brink, monstrously bloated budgets on games like Shenmue finished the dc off quicker than it should of gone, if they hadn't made that one game, there could of been a chance to turn it around with decent advertising.

[Anpanman]

Yes, no interest in online.

When I get the PS4 this coming year I'm tempted to never put it online and just ask Sony for the Blu install disk.

Think this will be my last gen, I firmly believe PS5 and on will be online only.

[BaronSqwelch]

I'm glad psn has been down for days...not had much time to use it and as it made the BBC I look forward to the compensation they give us next month when I have loads of time

[Asura]

Meanwhile, seventeen years after launch, people are still playing Ultima Online.

In fairness, though, UO can be an example of both points, as the game called UO these days is massively different to what launched all those years ago.