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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Sony is saying PS5 is entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’[0] while there are only 13 PS5 exclusive titles available [1]. So PS5 is propably not doing well.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-entering-the-latter-stage-o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga...

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I spoke with some console game devs who worked with PS5 title: there is a major problem with AAA title development. Because the games have become so big, it takes 5 years to produce one. The console life cycle is 5 years as well. Thus, as a game studio, you can only cram one AAA title for each console generation.

Then you need to start from the scratch with new console, new SDKs, new bugs and so on.

Isn’t the PS5 just a juiced up PS4 at this point? How much is the SDK really changing from generation to generation anymore?

The life of the juiced up Gamecube (Wii) might offer some guidance here.

Someone should invent a game console that is modular so it can be updated as time goes on. It would also be wise to use a standard architecture, so that games remain compatible across different modular configurations. Call it something like "Parts Console" or "Personalized Console".

PS4 is selling at similar rates as PS5, at this point in the lifecycle they had similar sales.

That being said:

- sales have been inflated by pandemic

- most games are released on older gen consoles too

- PS5 has too little console-selling exclusives.

- Even of those that have, they are pretty much all sequels to PS4 selling games: spiderman TWO, horizon TWO, God of War TWO. Safe for Bloodborne all these first 4 years games got a PC release, so not really that exclusive

- Graphical generation jump is just "meh". Especially if you play on your sofa few meters from your TV, you're hardly to appreciate higher resolution, because besides higher resolution the PS5 only offers marginal graphical updates to games that you really need to look for (shades, reflections) and are highly dependent on the effort of the developers

For transparency, the number of PS5 exclusives has gone down because of Sony's strategy of porting some of their older exclusive games to PC [1].

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/playstationstudios

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