Lately, the enthusiast discourse around game consoles and adjacent hardware has had me rubbing my eyes and checking the calendar. What year is it? Why are we talking about PlayStation, Xbox, or even the Steam Machine as if the games industry got trapped in a time vortex, perpetually stuck in 2008?

I understand the temptation. In 2008, games made sense. Consoles were king. Mobile hadn’t quite figured itself out yet and PC gaming was only beginning to rebound thanks to Steam. A quick look at the Circana (then NPD) data from holiday 2008 paints a clear picture: even as the global economy melted down, people played games.¹ More specifically, console games.

At the same time, Microsoft and Sony were in a knock-down, drag-out fight for the exclusive titles, bonus content, you name it. Everything was up for grabs. They used every trick in the book to try getting a foothold in your living room, much to the delight of brand zealots and list warriors everywhere. It was the continuation of a paradigm that had already existed for decades: a console war that was one part fun and another part easy to understand.

But almost 20 years later, a lot has changed. Comparing the market that was to the market that is tells you everything you need to know: consoles, as a product category, increasingly serve an older, wealthier audience.² Many people are opting out of consoles as their primary gaming devices in favor of playing on their PC, tablet, or phone. The pillar is now simply a pillar. Not to be written off entirely, but certainly not deserving of the weight assigned to it in popular discourse.

This comes to mind in part because of the recent conversation around the Steam Machine. Setting aside that the Steam Machine’s price is one of the clearest manifestations of the global memory and storage shortage as it applies to game hardware, a common refrain is that its price tag makes it difficult to compete with the PlayStation 5. A lot of folks on ResetEra, Reddit, and elsewhere hem and haw over what they presume to be Valve’s foray into the console space, while missing a critical detail:

That’s not what the Steam Machine is at all.

It’s another push to remove the barrier between you and Steam. To break Steam out of the confines of your PC. It is an extension of an existing mode of play, just like the Steam Deck. It is practically a given that you already have a Steam account with a reasonably sized library. It reflects the future of games: available at your convenience and without boundaries, for all the good and bad that brings. No one in the market for a console is going to weigh their options between a PlayStation 5 and a Steam Machine. If you want a console, you are simply getting a PlayStation 5 or Switch 2.

Valve doesn’t need to compete with consoles. To assume Valve does is not just wrong, but a fundamentally antiquated way of thinking. The battle has long been conceded to Nintendo and Sony. Enthusiasts believe the console war rages on, but no company is picking up arms.

To that point, the discourse around the Xbox is much the same. As I’ve discussed previously, Microsoft’s heart isn’t in Xbox the way it was in 2008. Their business model has molded into something that leaves very little justification for keeping their hardware business around. Yet still, folks talk about exclusives and theorycraft strategies for Microsoft to bounce back and rejuvenate their war with Sony. But why? Is it really worth fighting for?

Well, not really. Maybe it was before, but not anymore.

This isn’t a space of infinite opportunity; it’s stagnating and narrowing its focus. Consoles are more of a niche luxury good now than they’ve ever been. They’re getting more expensive, not just from tariffs or inflation, but generative AI companies devouring mountains of memory and storage. Component prices have doubled or even tripled in a matter of months.³ The Xbox Series X I bought refurbished only a few years ago for $300 is now set to sell for almost three times that, new, later this year and the price tag for the next generation of consoles doesn’t look any better.⁴ PlayStation and Xbox hardware just experienced one of their worst performing Mays in decades based on unit sales.⁵ It’s hard to imagine a more turbulent and precarious period for consoles in recent history.

And yet, a contingent still debates what in Microsoft’s portfolio could be the next great exclusive after Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution to help make Xbox competitive again and who, if Xbox bows out, is chomping at the bit to take its place in this “heated console war.” They’re advocating for Valve to subsidize the Steam Machine to get it into more homes, like the console wars of yore. They’re arguing over Grand Theft Auto 6’s pre-order splits,⁶ because the fight between PlayStation and Xbox is long over but they need to grab onto something that makes sense to them. They’re reaching for comfort in the face of an undeniable truth: the industry is changing fast and there’s no going back.

It’s not 2008 anymore.