So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.
You could never really build a better PC for the same price, consoles were always $300 to $400 cheaper than the equivalent PC at launch by design. Pre gen4 consoles really had to compete with Arcades and gen4 to gen 6 really only had to compete with each other. Gen 6 and after now have strong competition from PC and mobile.
PC suffered from a lack of eco system, cost, and complexity. Consoles were sold at a loss at launch because the software was tied to the proprietary hardware and they could make their money back by offering exclusive games and pay to play online.
Now consoles are just under powered custom PCs and Steam/GOG have built eco systems for PC to make PC gaming more friendly and now Steam is building hardware to make PC gaming more affordable. Plus with cloud gaming everyone can stream just about any game no matter what hardware they have.
Nintendo will probably hang on the longest with their unique hardware and IPs that will never ever get ported to another system, at least not until Nintendo no longer builds their own hardware.
AI and Cloud gaming will probably be the biggest thing to revolutionize the gaming industry and probably the most destructive since Atari over saturated the market. At least in the short term.