Playstation 5 Pro

But my point is that a holding a solid 4k vs dropping down from 4k to 2k upscaled when the action ramps up is barely visible to most people sitting 6 feet from a TV. It's diminishing returns. And what does 8k bring if you don't have a 200in tv? Can you even see the difference?

Digital cameras went through a similar cycle. Since about 2008, high-end digital cameras have been good enough that the pictures from them still look great when produced by a good photographer. There has been a lot of sensor improvement since then around dynamic range, etc, but it is not super obvious in a sales demo. Digital camera sales have totally fallen off a cliff and now what sells now is software improvements on cell phones that make it easier to take good pictures with no thought, not drastic hardware improvements.

I think that consoles are starting to hit a point where they are powerful enough for the kinds of games that we currently have the resources to build. Making the graphics even "better" requires an enormous development investment that only pays off for the few most popular blockbuster games. It's hard for a console maker to find compelling demonstrations of why they need more power right now.

Like with cameras, miniaturization and new form factors is really interesting. Nintendo is killing it with the Switch despite the dinosaur hardware. It's a lot easier for them to demo improvements for a Switch 2 because the Switch isn't at the point of "good enough" yet for many types of games.

Of course computers will get more powerful and console development isn't done forever or anything like that. But it feels like the hardware is currently a bit ahead of the software maybe for the first time in history which makes the value of a upgrade tenuous for many consumers.

1. Just like movies, you don't own anything. Revocation can occur at any time.

2. More likely than movies, you might find your game patched to add or remove content you do not want.

3. You can't give your games to the next generation. Which matters a lot when your exposure to gaming started from NES and Atari hand-me-downs.

4. Every game you purchase is chained to just yourself. Which is actually stupidly selfish when you have a large extended family also interested in games. The Switch is a hit for borrowing back and forth from a large network of relatives and friends (and, if Nintendo's reading this and questioning the resale market - this has caused a lot of games to get bought that wouldn't have).

5. If you have a large NES collection, there will be someone interested in paying for it. If you have a large Switch collection, there will be someone interested in paying for it. Physical games have some asset value, and it can be thousands of dollars for larger collections. Digital games have zero value.

I compared the prices of disc releases and digital releases on the PS5 in early 2023 and you could often get the physical disc release for cheaper than the digital:

Final Fantasy XVI (PS5): 65€ disc / 80€ digital. Hogwarts Legacy (PS5): 59€ disc / 75€ digital. Diablo IV (PS5): 70€ disc / 80€ digital. Resident Evil 4 (PS5): 60€ disc / 70€ digital.

I think a lot of people would stop buying consoles if they couldn't sell the games they have finished or do not like anymore to fund the purchase of other games.

That's lived in my head since.

I played Excitebike [0] on a friend's childhood NES and CRT TV while visiting over Thanksgiving. All we had to do was blow the dust off the cartridge, and we were living in 1984 again. Having physical copies makes this scenario far more likely to succeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitebike

Physical media gives the impression at least to console gamers that they "own" the game for the long term and the loss of a digital storefront won't impact them (even if it's not always true).

Whereas with a disk you can pay substantially less due to your choice of competitive retailers (in my region Space Marine 2 is $79 at some retailers or $109 from Sony), buy secondhand for older titles (most of my library is secondhand), and resell or trade-in games when you're finished with them. And of course it's not tied to an ephemeral account, so you will always have access to the titles you've purchased.

Also for my use case, my PS5 doubles as a Blu-Ray player which is worth a good $100-200 just by itself.

But yes, other obvious benefits include sharability, resellability (especially these days. So many childhood favorites sell for 200+ dollars for some reason), a perhaps false sense of preservation (I know there are some icky server issues on gen 7+ consoles, even for single player games), and simply liking the feel of a case and disc.

For example, take last generation. The Xbox One launched at (all USD) $500, $400 without Kinect once that was an option. PS4 launched at $400. The PS4 Pro also later launched at $400, The xbox One X launched at $500.

This is a $200-$280 (including adding the drive) jump in price and the base model is still the same price or more expensive in some places than it was at launch.

On the flip side, I also do worry about what exactly we are seeing from Sony again. We know that Sony can get cocky when they are on top (See PS3, cross play, etc) and make decisions that are not good for gamers. I worry this is a sign that they are going that way again.

We are applying the status quo as the only possible way to run game consoles when that doesn't have to be true. AMD and Nvidia compete just fine on the merits of their hardware alone without exclusive games.

Even Sony is realizing that they can't only publish on their own consoles. What Microsoft is doing now with Playstation they have already been doing for quite some time already with their games launching day one also on PC.

We also can't ignore that the need for the console is changing with things like xcloud (which runs Xbox hardware on blades, so it gives them incentive to continue making xbox hardware that can both ship as a home console and in blades). xCloud you can even use without any extra hardware (other than a controller) right on your TV with Samsung.

Obviously xCloud isn't going to be the solution for everyone. But we can't apply how things previously worked to how Xbox is trying to just have a different business model. And it isn't anything new with the ABK acquisition. It is continuing what they have already been doing.

Another reason I like it is because I prefer to have my console games on a disc, this way I can share it with friends and I don’t have to be at the mercy of people like Sony who is not afraid to remove access to something you paid for.

so to do that cheaply you need to use some kind of vector art. which gives everything this kind of vector smoothness which eliminates some of the roughness which gives character and charm.

but i agree that the switch is the closest remaining thing to that past era.

FF7 and Hogwarts do both use Unreal, yes.

I think there’s a good reason Sony is themselves shifting toward the PC.

>don't need to buy new 2024 PC components to have a great gaming PC

No, you don't. But if you want to compare a PC to a console, you should use equivalent specs. People who just want a convinient way to play games (not AAA games) can pick up a steam deck for $200-300 and be set for life. But that's not who Sony is targeting.

I assume GP was talking more in the 2020 era than right now. That era where a "switch pro was rumored", and then they unveiled the Switch Lite.

Then rumors swirled again, and we got the Switch OLED.

by now we know they completely skipped the idea of a mid generation refresh, so current rumors go straight to a new generation.

>the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers

plans change, especially in this economy. It may be baffling to western economists, but the software side of Nintendo also isn't afraid to sit on fully finished games if the timing is off. Advanced Wars remake was delayed a year for bad timing (to put it lightly). Xenoblade was finished for a while, and decided to push its release date up to space it out from Splatoon 3.

They read the winds changing, and realized Switch base was still selling well (and even if it wasn't, Nintendo famously has a decent war chest for tough times). So they just sat. They aren't on the same pulse as Sony/Microsoft, so they aren't pressured by the competition or hardcore consumers to upgrade. Japanese companies have a different attitude towards shareholders, so they aren't afraid to push back if they deem the long term solution is to wait. Nintendo truly goes at its own pace, for better and worse.

>But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!”

I think it's the perfect example of "rumors are wrong". Because I'm sure most industry rumors are right... at the time the rumor holder got the info. That info can and often is outdated, simply because situations change so fast in gamedev. So don't take them as gospel.

I certainly don't care any longer about it beyond the XBox App on Windows.

Look at high-end gaming PCs. Monster-sized GPUs and cases. CPUs with stupendous requirements for cooling. Insane power draws. The prediction for next gen (5000 series): significantly larger power draw still.

Things are not getting smaller and faster, they're getting bigger and hotter and more power hungry.

So they manage some potato PCs as minimum requirements but not the Series S?

Their strategy is simple: affordable portable console for the whole family with exclusive access to a wide library of acclaimed first-party titles. They essentially have zero competitors besides relatively obscure retro handhelds from China that are too difficult to use for the average person.

But Sony’s strategy is seems to be basically begging their users to ditch their PS5 for a PC. Go play our games on PC, here’s a Pro console that costs as much as a new PC or GPU upgrade.

At least Microsoft’s strategy to own a large chunk of the AAA software market makes some level of sense in a world where they see their console hardware possibly exiting the market.