Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

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The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles launched in Fall of 2020.

That’s almost 6 years ago. The PlayStation 6 and the new Xbox should be launching soon. If not this fall then perhaps next fall when it will be 7 years from the launch of the current generation.

How will the memory crisis impact all of this?

Also I find it kind of ironic. In the 2010’s PC gamers would go online all the time and sneer about how consoles were holding back PC gaming. How they could upgrade their PC’s but games were still not unlocking the full potential of their PCs due to having to optimize for the old PS4 and Xbox One hardware.

And now on the same forums PC gamers actually keep talking about how they don’t want Sony and Microsoft to release new hardware. And they talk about how devs should be optimizing for old hardware. So many complaints about Doom The Dark Ages requiring ray tracing and requiring new hardware…. The hardware that Doom the Dark Ages (2025) requires all came out a few years prior. Imagine somebody in 2004 when Half life 2 came out complaining their Half life 1 (1998) hardware didn’t work for that game…but that’s what many gamers online said when their rigs that could play Doom Eternal (2020) couldn’t play Doom the Dark Ages (2025). “How the turn tables” as Michael Scott famously said I guess.

Besides the AI shortage, Moore’s Law has ended which means in order to get faster chips, you have to use bigger dies, fancier packaging, more cooling, more power. This increases costs.

A PS6 really doesn’t increase much over the PS5 even without the AI shortage. You’re probably getting doubled the performance at best, which barely makes a noticeable difference in gaming when PS1 to PS2 had 180x better GPU.

I think the next leap has to come from mostly software and I think we will move towards a world in which most/all of the rendering is done by an AI. See Google’s Genie3.

The reality is more along the lines of traditional rendering with special ML models inferring and splicing in generated frames. Framegen is already in most modern games and Nvidia has made it a driver level option for many unsupported ones. In case you haven’t used it — it is black magic. Studios will have almost no motivation to optimize if framegen can be perfected, and it’s not far.

Hopefully Nvidia doesn't try to bundle a bunch of slop to completely change faces of characters with AI into future framegen updates (claiming that it's in control of the developers but then not even checking with the devs of the game they put into the trailer for it) like they did last time...

https://www.techradar.com/computing/gpu/nvidias-ceo-goes-ful...

Your conclusion that "... in order to get faster chips, you have to use bigger dies, fancier packaging, more cooling, more power.", is really not supported by the ending of Moore's law.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years, with minimal increase in cost.

  Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years, with minimal increase in cost.

Exactly. That is no longer true.

In any case, hardware progress has slowed to a crawl. Maybe a new console every 10 years makes sense now.

> That’s almost 6 years ago. The PlayStation 6 and the new Xbox should be launching soon. If not this fall then perhaps next fall when it will be 7 years from the launch of the current generation.

They most likely won't.

Also given the current mess XBOX management happens to be in, as someone that has been on PC since 1991, I don't have big hopes Helix actually happens, or if they do release it, it would most likely be to comply with existing contracts and avoid possible lawsuits.

It's probably more that hardware and software were still rapidly getting better in 2004, and HL2 looked significantly better than HL1. By contrast, just looking up the two on youtube, Doom the Dark Ages on ps5 pro isn't obviously any better looking than, say, Skyrim (2011). Even Morrowind looks pretty good with some high resolution pbr textures and a few new shaders.

This gotta be least memorable generation of all time. Nothing worth noting released on those consoles.

> Nothing worth noting released on those consoles

Have you heard of Elden Ring?

Or is your complaint about cross-gen, timed exclusives, and PC releases? Or that there aren't enough new franchises beyond established series and remakes?

Personally I see all of the above as fine. For example Capcom has Resident Evil Requiem (series), Onimusha (remake), and Pragmata (new).

All PC games. This generation of consoles was just worthless, no meaningful exclusives. The only thing that might save them is GTA VI.

GTA6 is presumably a timed exclusive, so why ignore other timed console exclusives like... FFXVI, FF7 Remake, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, Stellar Blade, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding 2, Spider-Man 2, Rise of the Ronin, etc.?

And what about Astro Bot, Demon's Souls, Ghost of Yotei, Gran Turismo 7, Saros, Sons of Sparta, ...?

Or anything by Nintendo?

Looks to back catalogue since ZX Spectrum, Amiga and all the other systems, available on PC.

Pretty much this. Everything is a timed exclusive and eventually available on PC through emulation etc.

That being said, it's still nice to be able to easily run something like Demon's Souls, Fable 2/3, or the latest Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Pokémon/Fire Emblem/Animal Crossing/etc. without having to mess with emulation.

The games that really seem to have vanished into the sands of time are MMOs with no available private server. Though I still hope to be able to play DC Universe Online, Wildstar, etc. someday.

Most of us don't suffer from FOMO for a few AAA titles.

There is hardly anything that would make me shell out for a console like I did with the PS2, and that was only because eventually I could get PS2 Linux, with official access to the hardware, minus a few tidbits.

PS3 OtherOS killed and without graphics acceleration.

XNA and UWP Developer mode, killed.

Games themselves, plenty of choice on PC stores.

Prices have gone up since then, but at the time this article claimed $7/fps for PS5 vs. $17/fps for Steam Machine (which attempts to provide a console-like experience):

https://www.steamfps.com/guides/steam-machine-vs-ps5

see also:

"$400 more, fewer FPS" https://shattered.io/steam-machine-vs-ps5/

But this also notes that 5-year TCO may be lower once you account for PS+ subscription fees and Steam sales/discounts.

The video games market currently has a lot more problems going on than just hardware scarcity. Just like how streaming has slopified and gutted Hollywood and cinema production in general [0], subscription-based business models and consumer-hostile delivery have done the same to video games. Gone are the days when studios used to focus on novelty and creativity, now it is all about engagement metrics and RoI slop.

[0] https://youtu.be/g6YvkbqAhAY

There are still lots of great games though.

Yes, but bar a few outliers they are not of interest to large publishers and producers.

Large publishers (and studios) tend to go for large games and usually some combination of sure bets (series, remakes) with a smaller number of riskier bets (new properties). Fortunately there are tons of smaller producers and we have digital storefronts (Steam etc.)

Medium-sized publishers like Devolver, Annapurna, or Humble Games are an interesting middle ground.

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