From the beginning, videogames have been limited to two big keys: the hardware’s potential offered in each era, and the developers’ capacities to handle its limitations and make the most of it. This allowed the arrival of amazing games in times when, technically speaking, they seemed impossible and has also made easy a sustained evolution which led us to a time when photorealism began to be added “at a stone’s throw away.”
In this sense, videogame consoles have also played a key role. I know that a lot of us like to play more in a PC but consoles have been the big motor of the industry so much so that presently their weight is so great that they have finished monopolizing development cycles. They will leave behind those years when games were created exclusively for PCs that they truly maximized the platform’s hardware. Now everything centers on the star consoles of each generation and this has very clear consequences.
Consoles have very positive effects in the videogame world but they also have negative effects. Life cycles have been extended in a considerable way, something that, combined with developments exclusively centered on them, has finished damaging the use of the latest generation PCs’ hardware. They have slowed down the evolution of videogames in a broad sense.