Are the console wars still going on?

[Shadow1980]

I mean, yeah, kinda-sorta.

There is still direct competition between PlayStation & Xbox. Both MS and Sony spend considerable effort trying to acquire exclusive marketing deals and sometimes even timed-exclusive software. MS is still sinking a lot of money into building the Xbox brand after losing significant market share last generation, as the buyouts of Zenimax and ABK show. How long the competition continues between them remains to be seen. If any of the Big Three ends up going third-party first, it's going to be Xbox, but for the time being it seems like they're in this for at least the next decade, even if they consistently trail PlayStation in terms of sales.

Of course, things are far less overtly confrontational than they were in the 90s, when console makers (esp. Sega) would routinely engage in what amounted to attack ads, finding ways to denigrate the competition. The "16-bit Wars" really felt like an actual conflict between competing companies. Nowadays it's just certain gamers themselves denigrating other platforms out of brand loyalty, while the actual people who run these companies' gaming divisions are publicly rather magnanimous towards their respective competition.

And these days, Nintendo only serves as nominal competition to the others. For the past 18 years they've been doing their own thing, offering different experiences than what you get from a conventional home console.