Damn. There’s no way for the video game industry to spin this. Console hardware sales are at their lowest level since 1995. November unit sales for 2025 came in at 1.6M. Barely above where the market sat three decades ago. The difference is context. In 1995, the PlayStation, Saturn, and Nintendo 64 were about to reset the entire industry. In 2025, there is no cavalry coming. This was a launch year for the Switch 2. Combined sales of Switch 2 and the original Switch are still below Switch sales last year. That should not happen in a healthy market. Elsewhere looks worse. PlayStation hardware sales are down 40%. Xbox is down 70%. That is not a cycle. That is structural damage. One problem is that the previous generation is good enough. PS4, Switch, and Xbox One still run most games fine. Visual gains are incremental. Performance gains are niche. That is why new games keep shipping on old hardware. If performance does matter, PC is the obvious upgrade path. A GPU costs more than a console. But console pricing has not fallen in 5 years. It has risen. The value proposition has flipped. Consoles also face pressure from handheld PCs. The Switch 2 has respectable hardware. It does not meaningfully outclass the Steam Deck OLED. Against Legion Go or ROG Ally models, it loses outright. These devices sell fewer units, but they extract more money per unit and serve a broader use case. Then there is the PC ecosystem itself. Games are cheaper. Online is free. Storefronts compete. Steam alone will see roughly 20,000 releases this year. That scale makes console libraries look constrained and curated by comparison. A new Steam Machine is also expected next year. Pricing is unknown. But it will not be framed as a console. It will be a PC with a console interface. At $1,000, that is defensible because it is a general-purpose computer. Documents, media, creative work, keyboard and mouse support. Consoles cannot justify that comparison. Low-end pressure is just as real. Smart TVs now handle gaming natively. Pair a controller to an Apple TV and you are done. Many LG TVs ship with Xbox, GeForce Now, and Luna built in. No external hardware required. Below that, Android devices and Raspberry Pi systems cover emulation. This is not only piracy. There is active homebrew. New releases for obsolete systems. Fantasy consoles like PICO-8. With tools like FEX, running PC software on ARM hardware is no longer a barrier. Console prices are rising while being attacked from both ends. High-end PCs above. Old consoles, smart TVs, mobile devices, and hobbyist hardware below. The final problem is collectibility. Consoles used to mean shelves. Boxes. Physical proof of taste. Digital-only strategies erase that entirely. When ownership stops being visible, emotional attachment drops. If you are not buying a console out of habit, there is little reason to buy one at all. The sales numbers reflect that. And the trajectory is not improving.

IGN

Video Game Physical Software and Hardware Sales Just Had the Worst November in the U.S. Since 1995 - IGN

Last month, November, was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales mon...

Alien Storm is SEGA asking a simple question: what if Golden Axe, but with xenomorphs? That tracks. SEGA loved aliens. Enough to make Alien Syndrome, Alien Soldier, and Alien Storm. This was a recurring obsession. As SEGA beat ’em ups go, it’s solid. It just lacks the cult weight of Streets of Rage 2. That bar is unreal and still untouched. The game mixes in first-person, on-rails shooting between stages. Similar idea to Shinobi. It works and breaks up the pacing. You can tell it’s an early Genesis title. The color palette is muted. In 1990, this looked impressive. The NES could not do this. Hence the whole “Genesis does” era. If you were there, you know. If you like Golden Axe, Alien Storm will land. Not essential, but worth playing.

Empire of the Gods is a game I bought about 10 years ago and never played. Until now. I skipped it for one simple reason. It was a card game. The screenshots looked flat. I bought it during my potato-laptop phase, when I was scraping Steam for anything that would run. A few months later I upgraded my hardware, that constraint disappeared, and Empire of the Gods got abandoned. That was a mistake. I finally booted it up today and it is genuinely good. The tutorial is awful. It is not a tutorial so much as a dense wall of text. Poorly structured. Actively confusing. You will not understand the game from it. I didn’t. I learned by brute force. The core idea is simple. You play cards to raise attributes like Power, Faith, Wealth, and Life. Each stage sets target values. Hit them and you win. The tension comes from tradeoffs. Raising one attribute requires sacrificing another. You are constantly bleeding something you might need later. Every decision is a small act of damage control. When you finally clear a stage, it feels earned. The visuals are fine. This is a card game, not a spectacle. The Egyptian theme is consistent and readable. The music leans into a restrained, quasi-mystical tone and does its job without getting in the way. It also runs natively on Linux, which is a nice bonus. It should, given that it launched in 2008. If your machine has 1GB of RAM, you are covered. This sat untouched in my library for a decade. It shouldn’t have.