13 Facts About Game console

Video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller.

Some consoles are considered dedicated consoles, in which games available for the console are "baked" onto the hardware, either by being programmed via the circuitry or set in the read-only flash memory of the console.

Early Game console hardware was designed as customized printed circuit boardss, selecting existing integrated circuit chips that performed known functions, or programmable chips like erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) chips that could perform certain functions.

Improvements in Game console hardware followed with improvements in microprocessor technology and semiconductor device fabrication.

Consoles of the 1980s to 1990s, these improvements were evident in the marketing in the late 1980s to 1990s during the "bit wars", where Game console manufacturers had focused on their Game console's processor's word size as a selling point.

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The confluence with personal computers eased software development for both computer and console games, allowing developers to target both platforms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The TurboGrafx-16 was the first Game console to push on its bit-size, advertising itself as a "16-bit" Game console, though this only referred to part of its architecture while its CPU was still an 8-bit unit.

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

Effectively, each Game console generation was shown to have two or three dominant players.