As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete.
I don't think there is a mass exodus coming up, but a slow decline in console gaming for certain types of gamers, peaking in ps6 and digital only coming out is possible - whether that is more of a hit than the control of the market Sony will get from digital only is another question though.
For example I doubt it'll stop many playing GTA 6, but general purchases on Sony vs PC may be weighted to the latter a bit more now than previously as that physical collection part is dead now for Sony, and arguably worse than the PC market in terms of there being only one store front for digital.
The best games I've played in the last year would run on a PS4 and probably even a PS3 with a little optimization, yet we're already at the "end" of the PS5. It's so disingenuous. We should be squeezing everything we can out of the wonderful hardware we have today instead of chucking it for the new shiny thing, but instead we're force fed a new box, with a new exclusive title, with graphics you can barely distinguish from what we already have and more restrictions on what you can do.
I get that we have made huge strides in rendering tech, but the broad idea behind that I can still get behind.
Other than higher res assets, shaders and cleaner rendering; I havent seen anything that probably couldnt be done on those systems and still broadly have the same overall feel.
What I meant was we abandon perfectly good console hardware, not because it's outdated or obsolete, not because games demand the cutting edge, but because profit margins demand the consumer spend 500+ on new hardware every 5 years or whatever. It's nothing to do with the software and everything to do with shareholders.
The PC is the exact opposite of this.
There are no PC games that force you to buy a whole new device. There are games that your 5 year old PC might struggle with, but they're still compatible.
The top games on steam are mostly things that would run on 15 year old gaming rigs.
Backwards compatibility! I can still play games from decades ago on my current PC. On a console you're in luck if the game you played on the last generation is rereleased on the next one
You're not locked into a store, a network, or even an operating system.
It's true the AAA devs don't optimize much but my point is that Microsoft don't decide that you have to buy a new PC every five years and there are a bunch of new games coming out for it that are literally unavailable on your old one.
(Well ok technically they do exactly this but it's called an Xbox and it's a failure right now)