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Comment by three_burgers | Hacker News Reader

It feels like each time SCE makes a new console, it'd always come with some novelty that's supposed to change the field forever, but after two years they'd always end up just another console.

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You end up with a weird phenomenon.

Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the release to.

Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there’s little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.

Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It’s been like that for decades.

I suspect it won't be as much of an issue next gen, with Microsoft basically dropping out of the console market.

3rd party games will still want to launch on the Nintendo Switch 2, so it's still the same problem.

The Switch (even 2) is nowhere near the same class of performance as PlayStation or Xbox, games on them aren't comparable.

Yet those companies don’t necessarily compete for performance and comparaison, but instead for their own profit. If Nintendo makes profit from selling a device that runs a game in lower spec than Sony, they’re Happy with it. Computing devices aren’t driven by performance only.

Sure, but the point I want replying to was about the Switch 2 being able to make up for the loss of the Xbox as a PlayStation competitor. It can’t.

They are definitely doing something but it seems it’s going to be more PC-like. Like even supporting 3rd party stores.

I’m intrigued.

It’s also that way on the C64 - while it came out in 1981, people figures out how to get 8 bit sound and high resolution color graphics with multiple sprites only after 2000…

I think apart from cross-platform woes (if you can call it that), it's also that the technology landscape would shift, two or few years after the console's release:

For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.

That is very country specific, many countries home computers since the 8 bit days always dominated, whereas others consoles always dominated since Nintendo/SEGA days.

Also tons of blue collar people bought Chinese NES clones even in mid 90's (at least in Spain) while some other people with white collar jobs bought their kids a Play Station. And OFC the Brick Game Tetris console was everywhere. By late 90's, yes, most people afforded a Play Station, but as for myself I've got a computer in very early 00's and I would emulate the PSX and most N64 games just fine (my computer wasn't a high end one, but the emulators were good enough to play the games at 640x480 and a bilinear filter).

You got a very "interesting" history there, it certainly not particularly grounded in reality however.

PS3s edge was generally seen as the DVD player.

That's why Sony went with Blue Ray in the PS4, hoping to capitalize on the next medium, too. While that bet didn't pay out, Xbox kinda self destructed, consequently making them the dominant player any way.

Finally:

> PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.

PS5 did not have any novel approach that was consequently adopted by others. The only thing "novel" in the current generation is frame generation, and that was already being pushed for years by the time Sony jumped on that bandwagon.

You've got your history wrong too.

The PS2 was the DVD console. The PS3 was the bluray console.

The PS4 and PS5 are also bluray consoles, however blurays are too slow now so they're just a medium for movies or to download the game from.

You're right, I mixed up the version numbers from memory. I'd contest the statement "the history is wrong" though, that's an extremely minor point to what I was writing.

> PS5 did not have any novel approach that was consequently adopted by others

DualSense haptics are terrific, though the Switch kind of did them first with the Joy-Cons. I'd say haptics and adaptive triggers are two features that should become standard. Once you have them you never want to go back.

PS5's fast SSD was a bit of a game changer in terms of load time and texture streaming, and everyone except Nintendo has gone for fast m.2/nvme storage. PS5 also finally delivered the full remote play experience that PS3 and PS4 had teased but not completed. Original PS5 also had superior thermals vs. PS4 pro, while PS5 pro does solid 4K gaming while costing less than most game PCs (and is still quieter than PS4 pro.) Fast loading, solid remote play, solid 4K, low-ish noise are all things I don't want to give up in any console or game PC.

My favorite PS5 feature however is fast game updates (vs. PS4's interminable "copying" stage.) Switch and Switch 2 also seem to have fairly fast game updates, but slower flash storage.

Maybe I ate too much marketing but it does feel like having the PS5 support SSDs raised the bar for how fast games are expected to load, even across platforms.

Not just loading times, but I expect more games do more aggressive dynamic asset streaming. Hopefully we'll get less 'squeeze through this gap in the wall while we hide the loading of the next area of the map' in games.

Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5 games off USB anymore.

It does but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, they at least are willing to take some calculated risks about architecture - since consoles have essentially collapsed to been a PC internally.

I don't think it's a bad thing either. Consoles are a curious breed in today's consumer electronics landscape, it's great that someone's still devoted to doing interesting experiments with it.

That was kind of true until Xbox 360 and later Unity, those ended eras of consoles as machines made of quirks as well as game design as primarily software architecture problems. The definitive barrier to entry for indie gamedevs before Unity was the ability to write a toy OS, a rich 3D engine, and GUI toolkit by themselves. Only little storytelling skills were needed.

Console also partially had to be quirky dragsters because of Moore's Law - they had to be ahead of PC by years, because it had to be at least comparable to PC games at the end of lifecycle, not utterly obsolete.

But we've all moved on. IMO that is a good thing.

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