C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. The appeal of consoles to many in the industry is that it was locked down and you could ringfence your revenue but that's not to say you couldn't address these issues with modern commonly available technologies like digital signing and cryptography. Basically like what Apple is trying to do but that could certainly be improved upon in terms of implementation.

> C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to.

How is this state much different from installing Steam on a PC with a couple controllers and sticking it in your living room, besides the C64 being extremely cheap and (as far as I know) not as customizable?

Cheap and providing a long lived homogenous platform. Apple do this to a certain extent but not at the price point. You can customise with peripherals.

I would argue that the PC is (or will be) a longer lived platform, with homogenized interfaces that let it stay in the game far better than the C64 could dream of. My budget 8 year old PC - which initially had the cheapest CPU I could possibly buy for the socket - is able to handle itself admirably well, even on newest generation games because of how far progressive PC upgrades can carry things these days. Meanwhile, I'm confident there is likely a complete chasm in what could be accomplished on a C64 with peripherals vs a cheap 386 PC Clone released just 8 years later (or an 1990 Amiga, or a Mac for that matter). And even a Mac of comparable price from the same era as my own PC would have been a shelf piece far earlier than this PC will be.

PCIe slots can carry you pretty darn far, and if you can use a Genesis cartridge, you can upgrade a PCI slot. For instance, on mine I added: USB 3.2, an NVMe slot, and a new graphics card. If I wanted to, I could throw in a faster network card. I could easily use the latest generation graphics cards without issue. I can play a game with at least 60fps in 4K. The only thing that really limits you is the CPU socket and the memory. Even then, after a few years you can throw in the highest end (or near highest end) server CPU for dirt cheap and some better and larger sticks RAM for not so bad a price either.

As you say:

> The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss.

Also there was certainly a chasm in capability between the 386 and c64 but the games weren’t there and you would have had to spend a lot more. At that stage anyway we had Amiga which really wasn’t surpassed by PC architecture until maybe the late 90s