Video game console
[1] More recent consoles have shown further confluence with home computers, making it easy for developers to release games on multiple platforms.
The industry has developed a razor and blades model: manufacturers often sell consoles at low prices, sometimes at a loss, while primarily making a profit from the licensing fees for each game sold.
Ralph H. Baer devised the concept of playing simple, spot-based games on a television screen in 1966, which later became the basis of the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972.
Programmable consoles using swappable ROM cartridges were introduced with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976, though popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977.
These technological shifts include improved electronic and computer chip manufacturing to increase computational power at lower costs and size, the introduction of 3D graphics and hardware-based graphic processors for real-time rendering, digital communications such as the Internet, wireless networking and Bluetooth, and larger and denser media formats as well as digital distribution.
Following the same type of Moore's law progression, home consoles are grouped into generations; each lasting approximately five years.
Home video game consoles are meant to be connected to a television or other type of monitor, with power supplied through an outlet.
Pong in both its arcade and home format, had a handful of logic and calculation chips that used the current input of the players' paddles and resisters storing the ball's position to update the game's state and send it to the display device.
[7] Even with more advanced integrated circuits (IC)s of the time, designers were limited to what could be done through the electrical process rather than through programming as normally associated with video game development.
[9] Consoles since the 2000s are more similar to personal computers, building in memory, storage features, and networking capabilities to avoid the limitations of the past.
[11] In addition, consoles tend to focus on components that give the unit high game performance, such as the CPU and GPU, and as a tradeoff to keep their prices in expected ranges, use less memory and storage space compared to typical personal computers.
The Sega also supported the optional Menacer, a wireless infrared light gun, and such were at one point popular for games.
While magnetic storage, such as tape drives and floppy disks, had been popular for software distribution with early personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s, this format did not see much use in console systems.
Early iterations of external storage were achieved through the use of flash-based memory cards, first used by the Neo Geo but popularized with the PlayStation.
Nintendo continues to support this approach with extending the storage capabilities of the 3DS and Switch, standardizing on the current SD card format.
With additional fees, such as branding rights, this has generally worked out to be an industry-wide 30% royalty rate paid to the console manufacturer for every game sold.
In the case of Nintendo, the company generally has controlled the production of game cartridges with its lockout chips and optical media for its systems, and thus charges the developer or publisher for each copy it makes as an upfront fee.
[33] In the transition to digital distribution, where now the console manufacturer runs digital storefronts for games, license fees apply to registering a game for distribution on the storefront – again gaining access to the console's branding and logo – with the manufacturer taking its cut of each sale as its royalty.
[33] In both cases, this still gives console manufacturers the ability to review and reject games it believes unsuitable for the system and deny licensing rights.
The development of software emulators of console hardware is established to be legal, but there are unanswered legal questions surrounding copyrights, including acquiring a console's firmware and copies of a game's ROM image, which laws such as the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act make illegal save for certain archival purposes.
Manufacturers may offer alternate stock keeping unit (SKUs) options that include additional controllers and accessories or different pack-in games.
In some cases, these simply replace some parts of the hardware with cheaper or more efficient parts, or otherwise streamline the console's design for production going forward; the PlayStation 3 underwent several such hardware refreshes during its lifetime due to technological improvements such as significant reduction of the process node size for the CPU and GPU.
The base console unit in all revisions share fundamental hardware, but options like internal storage space and RAM size may be different.
As part of their licensing agreements, Nintendo further prevented developers from releasing the same game on a different console for a period of two years.
[43][63] Mario caught on quickly when the NES released in the West, and when the next generation of consoles arrived, other manufacturers pushed their own mascots to the forefront of their marketing, most notably Sega with the use of Sonic the Hedgehog.
[43] Another type of competitive edge used by console manufacturers around the same time was the notion of "bits" or the size of the word used by the main CPU.
[9] The use of bits waned as CPU architectures no longer needed to increase their word size and instead had other means to improve performance such as through multicore CPUs.
[10] Further, with the number of available consoles growing with the fifth and sixth generations, game developers became pressured to which systems to focus on, and ultimately narrowed their target choice of platforms to those that were the best-selling.
This cased a contraction in the market, with major players like Sega leaving the hardware business after the Dreamcast but continuing in the software area.
[10] Of the three, Microsoft and Sony, both with their own hardware manufacturing capabilities, remain at a leading edge approach, attempting to gain a first-mover advantage over the other with adaption of new console technology.
