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Barkley on 10 July 2019
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potato_hamster said:
Barkley said:

Your post makes no sense, the shoulder button is a physical reality, it's objectively real.

Meanwhile a device that has a cpu/gpu and ram but can't play games is objectively not a video game console.

Having the same hardware internally of a console doesn't make it a console. If it is capable of nothing other than playing video and music it is a media player. Thus hardware on it's own is not enough to define what a device is. You must take into account what it CAN be used for, which includes software, and what it was designed and created for.

I think you're taking me a bit too literal, and IO think we're saying the same thing. It doesn't matter if no sega genesis game did use the shoulder button as an input, it remains that it could. The potential is there, that's what matters.

We're not saying the same thing because you want someone to define the Switch as a "hybrid" console without using features of it's software, I'm saying you can't get an accurate definition of a device without taking that into account.

I'm saying features of it's software are a defining aspect. If some chinese company made a product that was an exact copy internally of a PS4 with the same Jaguar CPU, 1.84TFlop gpu, 8gb gddr5 ram but it was created only to watch video, and it had no games on it and they were never going to add games to it. You could not call it a video game console. Software features and Purpose matter when defining a device and cannot be discounted.

A button is always a button. A device with a CPU/GPU/Ram is not always a video game console. My Roku Box Hardware might have the "potential" to be a video game console, but it is not one.