This is new territory for the console industry, and it could end badly for consumers. For more than three decades, gamers and console manufacturers have entered into an honest pact: I buy your system for a few hundred bucks, and you, along with third-party developers, supply me with the best games you can make on that platform for five to seven years. This is how its always worked. As franchises such as Doom, Half-Life, and Far Cry pushed the graphical envelope on the PC, console gamers were content enjoying experiences that were less visually dazzling, but required less technical know-how (want to troubleshoot an NES game? Blow in the cartridge!). Maintaining a PC that can play the latest and greatest games gets wildly expensive, and gamers that refuse to upgrade risk being shut out from new releases after only a few years. Even if a newer title is compatible with older tech, it often suffers from a lower frame rate or generally poorer graphical performance.
Now, the gaming industry seems hellbent on bringing this frustrating experience to the console world. The shift began during the era of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as PC game developers found wild success on consoles through previously computer-centric genres, like first-person shooters and the Western RPGs. These developers decided to treat consoles just like PCs, leveraging gaming systems always-on internet connections to issue patches to already released games.
