Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.

It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...

I really have mixed feelings about this. Sure, emulation existed for a while but it always lagged enough or had small bugs to rarely match the spirit of the original (in rare cases it improved things with better framerates, resolution boosts and loading time cuts).

I guess this is somewhat late in the lifecycle of the PS5 but it feels different, like a death blow. Now that this is possible, it would most likely be easy to replicate when the PS6 comes out, or for any other console. Whatever competitive advantage with exclusives consoles have, goes away. And these deals cost a lot of money and take years to plan and execute.

I guess companies then transition to being software only, like Sega did? (though they never recaptured the charm they had when they were making their own hardware). Are we slowly witnessing consoles go the way of the cd player?

> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer

Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.

Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.

They’re not a hardware company*. Sony and Nintendo are. MS is kinda questionable.

* Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.

Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.