Do you find, overall, that you prefer the generations that were closely contended, or the generations where one console dominated, and why?

The ones where Nintendo dominates. The years where it's a different console is miserable

The consoles I'd say I have considerable experience with are PlayStations 1-4. I was probably too young and played too few games with the first one to form an opinion of the whole generation, but I enjoyed PS2 and PS3 a lot. I feel like those were two very solid generations, although Sony started showing some worrying signs later during PS3's lifetime (mainly attemps with online pass). The PS4 generation felt quite disappointing in some important ways, the most important of which are probably paid online play and total lack of backwards compatibility. I got a PS5 only recently, but so far it's been much the same as with PS4.

Overall, I don't think competition has been a major factor in how good generations have been so far. In fact, the only major thing it's done is bring paid online play everything, so that's a huge negative I'm not sure would have happened at all or at least so fast without competition, with Steam having had more time to set a stronger precedent for a service with free online play. I guess prices could be even worse, and I could certainly see the situation becoming much worse overall without competition, but dang, that paid online play sucks.

I'd also like to remind that regardless of whether you consider PC competition, it is there setting some limits on what consoles can do, especially in regard to pricing, so it's not like there's true lack of competition in gaming anyway as long as PC stays around.

Competitive. I may have only gotten interested in gaming (beyond Skylanders and some childhood games) in 2017, but seeing games like Cuphead dropping exclusively on Xbox is a memory I cannot let go it— legitimately had considered between purchasing an Xbox One and a PS4.

Neither. Dumb as it sounds I preffer the gens people understand console wars are dumb and we just vibe cause we like gaming as a hobby, sales are all over the place, not because we are married to a brand and close ourselves to things we are likely gonna love.

Ive been gaming for 35 years and brand vs brand never did me any good.

Fact is, thinking im team anything fucked me over.

I prefer when a game selling 100K off a store shelf was profitable. When development times were shorter and publishers could put up to a dozen or so games out a year. When publishers were less risk averse. I prefer when everyone was allowed to make a sports game. I prefer when we were not nickle and dime'd like crazy.

Console wars between gamers are indeed stupid. I was referring more do whether you think consoles having to compete against each other makes gaming better.

So basically every gen until the 8th?

6th is the last gen that qualifies. 7th while I do enjoy it, that is when Jeffery Eptsien started getting his hands in there and horse armor began (and other bad DLC practices from his suggestions) . Only EA and 2K could make sports games. Studios started closes left and right because of rising dev costs and now games needed to sell in the millions. Racism towards Japanese games was at an all time high. Risk aversion started rising it's ugly head. Capcom went nuts and butchered their IPs. 7th gen is when the bullshit really started but the problems we have with todays gaming wasn't full steam yet but it began there.

It's true some bad trends got their start there.

We were though still getting a ton of games per year with often relatively short 1-3 year dev cycles, and there were a bounty of bold new games that probably wouldn't get made today, at least not in the AAA space.

The best gen was PS1/Saturn/N64