I have to disagree. There are way too many reasons this would fail, though you do raise some good points. The benefits of one console would be the same as if Ninty stopped making home consoles and released their games on ps consoles. That way, the ps4 would get no drought, the xbone would not be able to compete and you would end up with one console.

Ninty home consoles haven't done well since the (s)NES and the only reason Wii did well was the novelty of the controllers. They might be lucky and come up with something revolutionary again, but overall it's a huge gamble and the more they make home consoles, the more they hurt the brand. Unfortunately the wiiu is at the moment the laughing stock (pretty much same with vita).

Two words: steam machines.

And Ouya does the marketing.

While the idea is all nice and dandy, such an endeavour would be doomed to fail; just look at Nintendo's and Sony's cooperation in the early 90's. It would be sweet as hell for us gamers, but the Big 3 wouldn't probably earn anything in doing this.

Sony will make the hardware

Microsoft will handle the software

Nintendo will support the games

There are several MAJOR reason I'll disagree.

1. This is called a monopoly. Or actually a cartel, but it would be the same thing.

So yeah, that one console is going to now launch at $600 or $700 purely because it can. Companies do not naturally offer products at loss unless there's substantial competition in the market, so the modern "sell the console at a minor loss and make it back later via software" approach would go right out the window. And, see #2: the higher price would probably not be completely unjustified.

The higher cost would then drive gamers to PC gaming because you can get a middle-end PC gaming rig for $700-$800, and Steam is notably cheaper and more convenient than the console used game market.


The second reason is that it will have smaller consoles built into it. If the big three colluded to make a console, you can bet that each company would put about $100 of hardware which would probably never see use beyond their own first party material. Individually for each company this makes perfect sense; they're carving a niche out of the hardware. It just doesn't help the consumer because they're now buying $100-200 of hardware they may never use.

3. Small developers will have a much harder time getting attention. It's just one of those things, but competition goes down as the market size decreases, so a small developer (like Atlus or Mistwalker) can actually take shelter on only one console, and still get attention because they aren't trying to expose their products to the whole ocean. In a one-console world, they HAVE to promote everywhere.


There isn't an ideal solution to the console wars. As a consumer, of course I want to buy one device and have it play EVERYTHING, but I can also see that causing problems on the business side.

Would paid online even exist if not for Microsoft?

Some food for thought.

Not a bad idea.

This is idea is the definition of a monopoly. Something interesting about monopolies. They're always bad for the consumer.