- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
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Well, the USD is worth 15% less today than it was when the consoles launched. As such, keeping the price the same is the same as discounting it with a stable currency. The price today is the same as $425 at launch, so prices have come down we just don’t see it reflected in the dollar price.
In addition to that we’ve passed that era of Moores law. New hardware is coming out with diminishing returns unless it’s big and expensive. We’re long past the era of every 2 years hardware is released with exponential returns in power and efficiency rendering everything that came before obsolete.
Hell even from an aesthetic point of view Red Dead Redemption 2 came out almost 5 years ago and with higher settings on PC still holds up as a pretty game. The biggest factor holding graphics back these days is development time and money.
Also fab production is a fundamental limitation to a greater degree than it was in the past, prices typically fell quickly as a process node gained better yields and could be made on less busy production lines but you have a much higher fixed cost just to convince TSMC or whoever to put you high enough up in priority to get your wafers made at all.
Well I make 3% more now because companies refuse to give raises compensatory with inflation let alone actual raises, so actually it’s more expensive.
I’ve been feeling like console generations don’t need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view. Rather than making new consoles as tech evolves, since we are facing diminishing returns, they are making them larger and more expensive. Given how the economy is, and how much people can afford, if they expect to keep making future consoles increasingly more expensive, they’ll find quickly that there is a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an entertainment device.
Not to mention that the production costs to keep up with the graphics potential of these extremely powerful consoles are also increasingly unsustainable. It’s time to focus on game design above anything else.
New consoles don’t come out in response to new technology, though. They never have. The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
They still need a reason for people to buy them. The usual one being “look how much prettier it is!”, but they are getting to a point the leaps of graphical fidelity enabled by technology are smaller and smaller, but the costs of making everything higher definition are skyrocketing.
The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
This isn’t true at all. The PS2 sold 50 million consoles after the PS3 released, and the PS3 only sold 80 million consoles.
The PS3 was horrible for Sony given their market position when it launched. It was super expensive while the PS2 was dirty cheap at that point.
The cheapest PS3 was launched at $499, with the next version at $599. And that was an astounding 17 years ago at this point. The idea that the PS5 launched at price points $100 cheaper than that just shows ridiculous Sony looked at the time to consumers.
They are following the Apple playbook. Put out a new system every 2 years and eventually will find some arbitrary ways to force users to upgrade.
I don’t think that is going to work as well for consoles as it does for phones. People can just keep playing older games. Living in a third-world country I know that too well. And if they try to sabotage the consoles, that might drive people away from console gaming entirely.
The inner generation consoles aren’t marketed to those who already own that generation. So the console cycle is still over every 7 years or so.
Apple doesn’t force you to upgrade. They have the longest support length in mobile. What they are fantastic at is convincing you that you need to upgrade.
Don’t they stop giving updates to slightly older devices. Also, I read reports of them slowing down older models as an incentive to upgrade. Late Stage Capitalism
They of course stop updating old devices. The 5 year old iPhone XR is getting updated to iOS 17 this month, and they are still putting out security updates to the 9 year old iPhone 5S.
They started limiting the CPU clock on older devices that had poor batteries in situations where it would try to draw more power than the battery could maintain. Identical devices with good batteries were not slowed down. Literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, but they failed to communicate what was happening which very likely lead people to buy new phones instead of getting their batteries replaced. At that time I had an iPhone for personal use and a Galaxy S5 for work. The S5 started doing the exact thing that Apple prevented when my battery started wearing out and random apps would crash the phone. However, unlike Apple where I could pay them $99 to fix it, Samsung and Verizon essentially told me to go pound sand and wouldn’t even sell us an official battery. We resorted to buying some sketchy thing off Amazon that never seemed to be as good. Kinda funny how Apple got all the hate, yet Samsung was the one that let me down.
I’ve been feeling like console generations don’t need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view.
I’m the opposite - I feel like the last 2 generations (including this one) have shown that generations are lasting too long now and need to go back to the 4-5 year length. The PS4 and XB1 were woefully underpowered the day they released, and barely managed to have games at higher resolutions than the previous generation. The current generation from day 1 has struggled to do stable 1080p/60 or 4K/30 with all bells and whistles, and now that we’re finally getting “next gen only” games they are sub-720p ffs.
Even shorter? What for? Games take so long to develop now, especially when targeting the highest resolutions, that many studios might not even get anything out in 4 years, or they might end up rushed if they do. They sure as hell wouldn’t end up with all the polish to take full advantage of the resolution.
In older generations, even the larger studios could manage to put out several games for them, and as they did they improved their skills with that platform, discovered more possibilities and optimized better. Longer generations will be better for gaming.
By your measure, the PS5 should be past half its gen. What does it have to show for it? Returnal, Ratchet & Clank and Demon’s Souls remake? Sure, we had a Pandemic, but there is also a bunch of other games for which the extra hardware is so unnecessary they could be released for the PS4? What good would there be in cutting it short so soon? Frankly I don’t think even the PS4 squeezed out everything it had to offer, which is why to this day multiplatform releases still come out for it.
What for? So we aren’t stuck with hardware that was already outdated on release for 8 years.
The PS4 still gets games because it has an install base of 100 million people to sell games to who are still spending money.
Consoles were never the top grade of computing hardware, they are supposed to be affordable for regular people. Though PS5 and XSX are closer to the newest tech compared to general computers than any consoles before, all the more reason we don’t need to rush another generation.
10 years used to be the difference between entire new worlds of experiences, the NES and the Playstation 1 are 9 years apart. Today, with a PS4, I can run God of War Ragnarok, one of the latest and greatest games, the same that PS5 got. Meanwhile, Nintendo got by just fine with hardware that is even weaker.
Better hardware has its benefits, but we got to a point where the constraints of weaker hardware are not all that limiting, and the expectations to reach the best that better hardware can offer are already extremely demanding which means studios need more time. Time that is already becoming too much for some developers. So, again, what’s all this for? How does it makes for better games? Just to have the newest so we have newest?
Well he’s not going to say " oh yeah, wait a year or two to buy our hardware for way less" now, is he?
Well lots of people wait for prices to come down, that’s what I’ve always done. Guess I am sticking with PC.
With Microsoft and now Sony releasing their first party games on PC, there really isn’t much point to own a console outside of Nintendo.
Do I need to play the new Spider-Man or God of War right now? No, I’m happy to wait for them to release on Steam.
Even then if you have the hardware to run the 1st party console games on PC you can always emulate the switch.
Quite true. I personally like having a physical handheld to play on, but a Steam Deck would do the job just fine.
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Not surprising since the previous generation also basically had zero price drops over the entire life of them.
