Hardwaer majority of the devices in this list came about from crowdfunding open hardware game console query. Retrieved August 11, University of Pittsburgh. Value chain management and competitive strategy in the home video game industry. Main article: Game development kit. Archived from the original on January 20,

In addition to built-in internal storage, newer consoles often give the consumer the ability to use external storage media to save game date, downloaded games, or other media files from the console. 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.

Certain consoles saw various add-ons or accessories that were designed to attach to the existing console to extend its functionality. Other examples of add-ons include the 32X for the Sega Genesis intended to allow owners of the aging console to play newer games but has several technical faults, and the Game Boy Player for the GameCube to allow it to play Game Boy games.

Consumers can often purchase a range of accessories for consoles outside of the above categories. These can include:. Console or game development kits are specialized hardware units that typically include the same components as the console and additional chips and components to allow the unit to be connected to a computer or other monitoring device for debugging purposes.

A console manufacturer will make the console's dev kit available to registered developers months ahead of the console's planned launch to give developers time to prepare their games for the new system.

These initial kits will usually be offered under special confidentiality clauses to protect trade secrets of the console's design, and will be sold at a high cost to the developer as part of keeping this confidentiality.

For example, any consumer Xbox One can be used for game development after paying a fee to Microsoft to register one intent to do so. Developers and their publishers must pay a fee, typically based on royalty per unit sold, back to the manufacturer.

The licensing fee may be collected in a few different ways. 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.

This also allows Nintendo to review the game's content prior to release and veto games it does not believe appropriate to include on its system. This had led to over unlicensed games for the NES, [37] and numerous others on other Nintendo cartridge-based systems that had found ways to bypass the hardware lockout chips and sell without paying any royalties to Nintendo, such as by Atari in its subsidiary company Tengen.

With optical media, where the console manufacturer may not have direct control on the production of the media, the developer or publisher typically must establish a licensing agreement to gain access to the console's proprietary storage format for the media as well as to use the console and manufacturer's logos and branding for the game's packaging, paid back through royalties on sales.

With the rise of indie game development , the major console manufacturers have all developed entry level routes for these smaller developers to be able to publish onto consoles at far lower costs and reduced royalty rates. Programs like Microsoft's ID Xbox give developers most of the needed tools for free after validating the small development size and needs of the team.

Similar licensing concepts apply for third-party accessory manufacturers. Consoles like most consumer electronic devices have limited lifespans. There is great interest in preservation of older console hardware for archival and historical purposes, but games from older consoles, as well as arcade and personal computers, remain of interest.

Computer programmers and hackers have developed emulators that can be run on personal computers or other consoles that simulate the hardware of older consoles that allow games from that console to be run. 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.

To help support older games and console transitions, manufacturers started to support backward compatibility on consoles in the same family. Sony was the first to do this on a home console with the PlayStation 2 which was able to play original PlayStation content, and subsequently became a sought-after feature across many consoles that followed. Consoles may be shipped in a variety of configurations, but typically will include one base configuration that include the console, one controller, and sometimes a pack-in game.

Manufacturers may offer alternate stock keeping unit SKUs options that include additional controllers and accessories or different pack-in games. Special console editions may feature unique cases or faceplates with art dedicated to a specific video game or series and are bundled with that game as a special incentive for its fans. Pack-in games are typically first-party games, often featuring the console's primary mascot characters.

The more recent console generations have also seen multiple versions of the same base console system either offered at launch or presented as a mid-generation refresh. 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.

In other cases, the hardware changes create multiple lines within the same console family. The base console unit in all revisions share fundamental hardware, but options like internal storage space and RAM size may be different. Those systems with more storage and RAM would be marked as a higher performance variant available at a higher cost, while the original unit would remain as a budget option. For example, within the Xbox One family, Microsoft released the mid-generation Xbox One X as a higher performance console, the Xbox One S as the lower-cost base console, and a special Xbox One S All-Digital Edition revision that removed the optical drive on the basis that users could download all games digitally, offered at even a lower cost than the Xbox One S.

In these cases, developers can often optimize games to work better on the higher-performance console with patches to the retail version of the game.

Resultingly, sales of these first optical media consoles were generally poor. This is typical for any computer technology, with the improvements in computing performance and capabilities outpacing the additional costs to achieve those gains.

Since the Nintendo Entertainment System, console pricing has stabilized on the razorblade model , where the consoles are sold at little to no profit for the manufacturer, but they gain revenue from each game sold due to console licensing fees and other value-added services around the console such as Xbox Live.

The competition within the video game console market as subset of the video game industry is an area of interest to economics with its relatively modern history, its rapid growth to rival that of the film industry, and frequent changes compared to other sectors. Effects of unregulated competition on the market were twice seen early in the industry. The industry had its first crash in following the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari's home versions of Pong and the Coleco Telstar , which led other third-party manufacturers, using inexpensive General Instruments processor chips, to make their own home consoles which flooded the market by 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.

This served as one of the first means of securing console exclusivity for games that existed beyond technical limitation of console development. The Nintendo Entertainment System also brought the concept of a video game mascot as the representation of a console system as a means to sell and promote the unit, and for the NES was Mario. The use of mascots in businesses had been a tradition in Japan, and this had already proven successful in arcade games like Pac-Man. Mario was used to serve as an identity for the NES as a humor-filled, playful console.

Since then, manufacturers have typically positioned their mascot and other first-party games as key titles in console bundles used to drive sales of consoles at launch or at key sales periods such as near Christmas.

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. The TurboGrafx was the first console to push on its bit-size, advertising itself as a "bit" console, though this only referred to part of its architecture while its CPU was still an 8-bit unit.

Despite this, manufacturers found consumers became fixated on the notion of bits as a console selling point, and over the fourth, fifth and sixth generation, these "bit wars" played heavily into console advertising.

Generally, increased console numbers gives rise to more consumer options and better competition, but the exclusivity of titles made the choice of console for consumers an "all-or-nothing" decision for most. 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.

Competition in the console market today is considered an oligarchy between three main manufacturers: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. The three use a combination of first-party games exclusive to their console and negotiate exclusive agreements with third-party developers to have their games be exclusive for at least an initial period of time to drive consumers to their console. They also worked with CPU and GPU manufacturers to tune and customize hardware for computers to make it more amenable and effective for video games, leading to lower-cost hardware needed for video game consoles.

Finally, console manufacturers also work with retailers to help with promotion of consoles, games, and accessories. While there is little difference in pricing on the console hardware from the manufacturer's suggested retail price for the retailer to profit from, these details with the manufacturers can secure better profits on sales of game and accessory bundles for premier product placement. 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.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Redirected from Console system. Interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system for running video games.

Arcade games Best-selling games franchises fastest-selling Highest-grossing games arcade mobile Most-played games mobile Games considered among the best Game of the Year awards Negative reception. Main article: History of video game consoles. Overview of the console generations, including generation overlaps. Major consoles of each generation are given for each.

See also: Home video game console , List of microconsoles , List of retro style video game consoles , and List of handheld game consoles. See also: List of dedicated video game consoles. An opened first-generation Xbox console and without the hard disc drive and optical drive, showing components like the power supply far right , cooling fins, cooling fan, and case features.

Main article: Game controller. The Nintendo Entertainment System gamepad with a single D-pad and two buttons. A modern controller, the DualSense for the Sony PlayStation 5, with multiple directional controls and buttons.

Mobile device running cloud game on Stadia with official controller. Main article: Game development kit. Main articles: Video game console emulator and Backward compatibility. See also: Console war , Video game industry , and History of video games. Next Generation. Imagine Media. December University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved July 23, The Verge. Retrieved July 29, Strong Museum of Play.

Retrieved August 16, Retrieved October 21, S2CID Home Video Game Industry". The International Journal on Media Management. Extreme Tech. Fundamentals of Game Design. New Riders Press. ISBN Value chain management and competitive strategy in the home video game industry. SSRN PC Magazine. Retrieved July 31, Retrieved July 30, Why they are so important for next-gen".

Tom's Hardware. Retrieved August 3, Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology. Game pads such as an Xbox or Guitar Hero controller often use a combination of digital keys and analog joysticks. CRC Press. Console games usually provide a proprietary controller. Retrieved March 28, Video games depend on their control schemes.

It governs how a player experiences the virtual environment, game dynamics, and underlying story put forth in a game. Wordware Pub. In many console action games, different buttons on the controller will perform the same action. Retrieved June 9, CBS Interactive, Inc.

Retrieved June 11, Technological, cultural, and social foundations of the Japanese video game industry". Research Policy. January 20, Retrieved June 20, People who design non-digital games like board games and card games can also do Open Hardware Game Console 90 so according to open source principles. For example, some game designers will release their materials under Creative Commons licenses so players can download, replicate, and, in some cases, even modify them. Designers may do this because they feel it makes discovering their games easier.

Potential players are more likely to try unfamiliar games if they can access and acquire the materials they need to play those games with little difficulty—or if they are able to receive copies of games from friends who recommend them.

Designers might also release their games under Creative Commons licenses because they feel that doing so helps promote their games' longevity. They feel that players who can freely share game materials are more likely to continue playing those games in the future and to introduce those games to others.

Occasionally game designers use rapid prototyping and crowdsourcing techniques to help them improve their games. They make their game design processes transparent so that would-be players can help shape their games' final forms. Designing a game involves playtesting it by asking players to play the game and offer their feedback on it.

People who make games tend to playtest their games as much as possible before they finalize their designs. By opening the design process, creators can more easily gather large groups of playtesters and hone their products more quickly than they could if the design process was closed or conducted in secret. Playing both digital and non-digital games can increase your familiarity with open source tools or principles.

Some games make changing the rules a fundamental part of playing those games. Looney Labs' Fluxx , for instance, is a card game in which the game's rules change every time someone takes a turn. Games like Fluxx encourage people to think of rules as fluid in the same way open source code, the rules that govern how people can use their computers, is flexible.

Other games make learning programming easier and more fun for people who don't have experience writing software. Robot Turtles is a non-digital example of one such game. CodeCombat and Hack 'n' Slash are digital games with the same goal. Some games specifically model the process of creating and manipulating open source software.

The game mimics the process of programming and maintaining websites using open source tools, and it introduces players to the Drupal vernacular. What is open gaming? Get the highlights in your inbox every week. How do open source principles apply to games? How do open source principles apply to digital games?

Digital games consist of multiple components, and open source principles can apply to each. Do open source principles only apply to digital games?

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