My point is consoles shouldn't really exist in the first place, since they are useless compared to PCs. If they didn't, there would be no licensing issues.
My username is actually something quite random I came up with - there is a spell called "Starfire" in World of Warcraft
Yeah, in a perfect world consoles would never exist. Linux would also be mainstream and fully supported, primary even, and games now would be using Vulkan and OpenAL with hardware accelerated sound once again being standard like in the Windows XP days.
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That's honestly why consoles begin with at all. We wanted to bring the fun of gaming and the possibility of a computer to the living room to show everyone and get it out of the small office they were usually stuck in, lets face it even now not many of us have living room computers unless it's setup as a home theater computer. So to say consoles were pointless I don't think is fair. We have seen innovation in the way the we interact with out media like the example you had with the Wii motion controls or even things like playstation eye which led to things like Microsofts Kinect. We have seen experiments in video games also with having moved the power of gaming to the living room making games appear more and more like movies the way tomb raider does or literally the way that Fox Hunt was by Capcom. While the room and the power to do more is there on the hardware side of things on PC. There has always been a reason to have the console. Though with things like steam machines and things like steam link and Nvidia shield. Their need and time is coming to an end in my opinion.
We?
And you already mentioned it, living room PCs. Consoles did nothing unique to bring gaming to the living room. Small form factor PCs have been a thing since before consoles.
I do give credit to PlayStation Eye. Things like that but much better exist on PC (TrackIR and now or soon eye tracking monitors), but I think Eye was the first. As for the Wii controller, it's kind of like a mouse actually, but even more freedom of movement of course.
Games becoming movies like Tomb Raider (which is also on PC) is often a huge design flaw, since they're forgetting their origins and failing to take advantage of the video game medium. All of their gameplay is just designed to funnel you into the next cutscene, they are basically static cutscenes and always the same upon every playthrough. No interactivity, no unique experiences.
Better examples of "cinematics" being used well in the context of video gaming can be found in BioWare games, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, and The Witcher 3, these games actually being interactive while being cinematic. Interaction is a massive advantage that cinema doesn't have, and also a core distinction that divides the mediums, and Naughty Dog games and Tomb Raider fail to incorporate this. It can take on many forms, such as letting you choose your dialogue responses directly (BioWare games, Telltale games), or making your seemingly automatically chosen dialogue actually the result of something you did in the past (Deus Ex), or countless others.
But this doesn't really have anything to do with consoles. Nothing about consoles forced those changes, good and bad, to happen. It was an inevitable style that can be traced back to both console and PC games of the past.
Music Alchemist hit the nail on the head really; in this day and age, consoles aren't entirely pointless due to licensing, them having a small amount of unique exclusives (mostly originating from Japan/Japanese designers).
But, as starefirepro and I have said, their inception was unneeded in the first place and ultimately a mistake that continues to limit gaming. The weak hardware of consoles has been a huge setback; imagine the progress games would have made if consoles never existed? Almost all in-game objects being physics based and casting dynamic shadows, all lighting being dynamic. Physics would be entirely GPU bound as some PC exclusive games have shown, thus affecting and improving games more. AI would be more advanced, especially large scale simulation AI.
All classics would no longer be hard/impossible to acquire (an issue that plagues consoles), and their great (and often better executed) ideas would still live on in modern games (too often they do not). Sound effects design wouldn't have suffered the big backwards leap that it did. Games wouldn't have had to be cut down in size, content, and interactivity so massively, like so many were. Display technology and audio processor technology would've advanced more as well. Input technologies would've advanced more too, like analog mechanical keyboards which could've been standard by now rather than prototype only. And I could go on...
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