Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoy the infinite entertainment and presentation format that consoles provide, but I really question their utility next generation

and lol no PC gamers aren't a part of that equation whatsoever

I feel like the potential console gaming crowd is so heavily diluted towards mobile and casual formats. any of the good VR titles are also running in wireless mobile formats with good enough graphics

I hope there is a differentiating quality to make the 'set top box' format a staple in the 2020s instead of "just" better graphics. I feel like it is necessary

View on HN

Nintendo has differentiated itself since the Wii and exited the graphics rat race. It really does limit the cross platform titles available, but thankfully Nintendo has their own great 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party offerings.

I think Microsoft is also deviating now. Microsoft tried to differentiate the Xbox One with Kinekt and an online-only console, but reverted due to backlash. Now they're trying again with Xbox game pass and much more cross platform/cross play availability. There're almost positioning themselves to go up against Google Stadia. But they might revert again.

So far I only see Sony sticking with the traditional model. Their marketing for PS5 and PS1 are essentially the same. "We have more games that look better."

Sony has changed their console strategy; for PS1-PS3 they made everything weird and complicated to show off. This gave them lock-in and made exclusive games prettier, once people had figured out how to program them, but the consoles were super expensive and cross-platform developers weren't interested.

PS4 is just a PC with some useful extras; PS5 probably will be too.

You're right I have noticed that in all the developer interviews. I was speaking more to the marketing to consumers. It still has the same value proposition and brand as it has all this time.

It might be what the market really wants, or they might lag behind.

> There're almost positioning themselves to go up against Google Stadia.

Microsoft has been talking about their Project xCloud and has had Xbox Game Pass around for a lot longer than Google Stadia has publicly existed, so it's maybe more that Google Stadia is positioning itself to go up against Xbox.

I used to be a PC gamer, but switched to consoles in recent years because I can spend a few hundred $ and have a machine that's guaranteed to run a large lineup of games at acceptable performance (sure, it won't be as good as a high-end PC, but the console also cost a fraction of what a high-end PC cost), and, has excellent exclusives (Bloodborne alone made buying a PS4 worth it for me). I will probably buy a PS5 for the same reason: laziness/convenience, exclusives, still costs less than a gaming PC (people often say its not true, but every time I price a passable gaming PC, it works out higher than the few hundred that a console costs, especially if you buy near console release and not when the hardware is a few years older)

With PC the hardware is more expensive but your investment can last longer and adapt with newer GPUs.

Also you are not locked into generations and such. I own a PS4 and I can't play my PS3 games for example unless I buy the "remastered" versions like Wipeout Omega Collection. Don't know if it's the same in the Xbox world. I know Sony has claimed that the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games at least. With a PC this is a non issue. I can still play Half Life 2 on any PC and it is a 15 year old game from the PS2 era.

The other issue is game prices. With PC you get huge discounts. It's common these days to find 50% discounts on a 3 year old AAA game during Steam sales, sometimes even 75%. The Sony Store never gets great discounts, except on very old or not so great games.

IMO the only clear advantage of console gaming is that it's "plug and play".

Xbox has been trying its best to move to the "PC model" where they don't break past games if they can avoid it in a generation change. The Xbox One at this point has a giant library of Backwards Compatible downloads for Xbox (OG) and Xbox 360 games, and the promise for the next generation (Project Scarlett) is that 100% of the games that run on the Xbox One will run on it.

Admittedly, the Xbox One still has a number of games that instead of showing up in the Backwards Compatibility library, encouraged repurchases for "Remastered" versions. Microsoft left that as a per-game decision to support BC or not, and whether or not to release a "Remastered" version. In some cases, Microsoft worked with the Publishers to help upgrade would-be BC owners to "Remastered" versions for cheap or for free (though often only through time limited deals and sales, so obviously not all owners benefitted in every case). Arguably one of the benefits in the case of some of the "Remastered" versions has been that publishers were given the chance to "upgrade" from custom ARM builds for the 360 to nearly the exact same x64 builds they run on Windows, further moving more of the library directly (and literally) to the "PC model".

Microsoft has a lot of good reasons to want the Xbox and PC to be friends and to increasingly apply the PC model to the Xbox. (Xbox Play Anywhere where you can buy a game once and play it both on PC and Xbox, often with cross-play between the platforms, is magical.)

The Xbox Store / Microsoft Store usually has good deals on par with Steam rotating every week, with the usual big sales around the holidays. They also generally have bonus discounts for gamers with Xbox Live Gold and/or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.

I'd say, use a site/service to check prices and get notifications when they change. I use psdeals.net (no affiliation or such). There I have a list of games I'm interested in and get an email whenever the price goes down. That is for playstation, but I'm sure there are options for xbox too. Nintendo seems not as eager to do deep sales, disappointingly enough. Deep sales are imho great for those games you hesitate on.

On that site, I can also see price history to see what the game normally sells for, or what the common sale price for it is. Meaning, I'm less trigger happy just because I see a "sale!"-sticker.

> but your investment can last longer

Console generations typically last 5+ years too, though. If I buy a console, I know that I'll be able to play all new games for the console. PC will last longer, for sure, especially if doing some upgrades along the way (I had my gaming PC for 6 years, with a GPU upgrade along the way), but the cost of consoles is still much lower (without inflation adjusting, my PC cost 4x what my PS4 cost).

> The Sony Store never gets great discounts, except on very old or not so great games.

I disagree. I rarely buy full-priced games, so the bulk of my library was bought discounted, including a bunch of not-that-old AAA titles. Sure, if I want to buy most games within a few months of release, I'm probably out of luck, but its never been "very old", a year or so at worst. But even if not, given that my (at time of purchase, mid-range) gaming PC cost 4x what my console cost, that's a lot of money to spend on more expensive games ;)

Laziness is my reason for being a console gamer as well. Over the last 15 years I've dabbled in and out of PC gaming, usually spending the money every time I buy a computer to make sure it has a fairly high-end graphics card. The end result is usually things will go great for a while then I'll try and play some game that will either not run properly or have some weird issue with my setup and I'll get frustrated and head back to console. My day job is figuring out why computers aren't doing what they are supposed, at night I just want to be able to stick a disk in something and have it work correctly.

The Last Of Us series with the up coming 2nd installment, Unchartered among others are just amazing. There are amazing exclusives for XBox too. Way to go brother.

A few more PS4 exclusives worth mentioning: God of War (2018), Horizon: Zero Dawn, Detroit: Become Human, Spider Man, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian and of course I've already mentioned Bloodborne.

I've been a bit disconnected from the Xbox exclusives this console generation, so I likely missed some fantastic games there.

It seems that epic have begun offering a lot of money for studios to port former exclusives to PC to sell on the Epic store, resent examples have been Jouney which was an exclusive for the PS3 and Detroit: Become Human is listed as coming soon.

I would guess more people are gaming on consoles regularly than PC's?

According to a 2018 survey from an industry analyst group, 52% of active gamers play on pc, 90% on mobile, and 41% on console.[1]

1. https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-gamers-vs-console-gamers-numbers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com