Hacker News Reader

Comment by fogihujy | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone buy a new Xbox? Most people I know still have regular HD TV's, and six year-old Xbox one or PS4 will do just fine for most of their needs.

There are very few games that won't work -- or have performance issues -- with the previous generation. Most are just the regular FIFA/NHL/Madden stuff, with the occasional overhyped mishap like CP2077.

It's the same situation as with the Xbox 360 -- as long as the previous generations can play the currently popular games, people won't upgrade. Hell, in the Microsoft Store, it's still remakes of 360-era games like GTA V and Skyrim that are being used to advertise the new consoles. No thanks my 360 still works fine! :D

The supply chain issues are only making it worse.

View on HN

Agreed, in a lot of cases it makes little sense to upgrade. That's true just about always when you don't have a 4k TV.

When you do have a 4k TV and it's large enough, a PS5 can look a lot better. Especially versus the regular PS4 (rather than the PS4 Pro).

But historically the Playstations are known for upgrades every 6-7 years (from 1994 to 2000, to 2006, to 2013, to 2020), and then a support of about 3-4 years after, for a 10-year lifecycle.

The PS5 has been out for a year, making a PS5 exclusive at this time that's totally specialised for the hardware makes little sense. There's 14 million PS5s out there, and 115 million PS4s.

But the big games are in the pipeline that utilise the PS5 hardware specifically, and after a while these new games won't run on 4 anymore, or will, but will look a lot better on the 5 or be very slow on the 4.

Paying scalper prices makes no sense at the moment, but the PS5 will eventually take over the 4. If you can get one at retail prices, I'd rather have one sooner than later, if you're switching some day anyway. The loading-time improvements are quite nice.

Oh, I'm sure we'll get there at some point, but until we get new games instead of remakes, there's little reason for it.

The thing with the supply chain issues is that they keep many gamers on XB1/PS4. Until the target audience grows, we're stuck in circle with FIFA N+1 and the game of the year 2011 ported to yet another platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com