Why is the 9th gen of consoles so.... barren...
Literally barely any games that can't be played on ps4 or Xbox one.
This ps5 almost feels like a waste of 500 bucks
My theory is that there was no reason to make a new generation of consoles, we have reached diminishing returns. People only need their games to look good enough and be big enough and run fast enough, the new generation just doesn't matter anymore.
Then again my primary form of gaming is ascii graphics so...
That's why we need to make video games that are NOT woke. With huge boobs. Big hair. Big asses and bigger attitudes. To finally show that cute barista with the blue hair that I am a MAN and I will NEVER back down.
Not woke means with huge boobs. Big hair. Big asses and bigger attitudes. To finally show that cute barista with the blue hair that I am a MAN and I will NEVER back down.
I hope that cleared it up for you.
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Some YT that hasn't been mined yet (as far as I know), satirical "anti-woke" content but its for Atari 2600 (and earlier) games.
People don't even need games to look good enough, the biggest breakout hit of the year is just a mismatched Unreal stock asset forest that runs like ass, but what matters is they put Pokemon in it so 15 million sales.
Only real leap I see this time is load times and maybe the frame rate is a bit better in some games.
SSD, VRR, and HDR as standard in all consoles was really the upgrade for this generation. Now if Microsoft would just get on board with gyro we could finally make some progress in the controls space.
Yeah the only thing that really impressed me about my ps5 was the load times truly are impressive for someone who never had a gaming pc with an ssd before
Well, that and Horizon: FW did look real pretty
Actually I gotta say this is very untrue. You coulda kept making games for the PS4, but not only does it have 7GB of memory to share, but its CPU cores are Jaguar architecture, made for netbooks in 2013. They are literally worse than AMD's own poor-performance FX CPUs from 2011, which is why stuff like System Shock remake runs 30fps on PS4/XBO but can hit 60 on a fourteen year old PC.
So while I agree largely about diminishing returns and that the new consoles are hopped up BS, (and their hardware is now even inadequate for many badly optimised games) the PS4 and XBO were not very good hardware c: The PS3 and 360 were similarly poor.
There is I think no reason to ever replace the PS5 or Series X; they have RDNA2 graphics, eight-core Ryzen 2 CPUs, 16GB of memory and extremely fast NVME storage. Unlike previous generations they are balanced and well-rounded.
It doesn't really make sense to force out a new generation of consoles for sales either, considering they're often sold at a loss. I guess for player retention?
I never owned a console from the PS4/Xbone generation because they sucked so much. I ended up getting a PS5 and even if most of the games I play are also on PS4, they run better with much faster load times.
Nice, I gave that a shot with a bottom-end AData SU650, didn't find it helped much but maybe a DRAM SSD is required?
Not always, but quite often
Found this with a quick search (pcmag)
Typically, when a new games console launches its price point is below the actual cost of manufacturing. But over time, through a combination of bulk component orders and the refining of the hardware design, the cost falls below the retail price. The PS3 was sold at a loss for nearly four years, the PS4 was profitable within six months of its launch, and the PS5 has taken eight months. Considering the novel new design and global chip shortages, that's quite impressive.
Microsoft doesn't share Xbox hardware sales figures and has recently stated no Xbox console has ever turned a profit for the company
Microsoft also makes you pay for online so I’m sure they recouped tons of money from that alone
Point taken.
I still wouldn't trust the companies directly for that though. Could be some accounting shenanigans involved.
the PS2 was famously long lived, with new games coming out for it years after the PS3's release. I think if Sony really wanted to force people to upgrade they could just do so by fiat, but historically they just haven't wanted to, preferring to release the next gen as a high-end upgrade at first, and only later releasing a variant that's within most peoples' budgets.
It's muddled with nostalgia, but I can be convinced a game looks good enough in N64 graphics. It's possible for magic to happen when the processing power is restrained
The low poly look is incredibly charming to me and I'm glad it's making a small resurgence in the indie scene after years of pixel platformers and metroidvanias.
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Crow Country
Vultures - Scavengers of Death is another one that I've been waiting on that may be of interest c:
Low poly count with textures have that really pixilated quality that makes it look like MegaMan Legends or Final Fantasy VII - not... sure what even causes that actually. It's like the polygons have pixels growing off of them?
My theory is that there was no reason to make a new generation of consoles
This is how microsoft and to a certain extent sony see it. With proprietary hardware more so being a thing of the past and the future being game pass or total bazinga shit like cloud streaming.
on the 360 playing battlefield bad company i assumed terrain destruction and stuff would be the norm in the future and maps would be a lot bigger with more people, i was too stupid to realize that the most important part of gaming is that the graphics get un-noticeably, incrementally better over time without any fundamental changes to gameplay or possible art styles, everything must be bland and 'photorealistic' or else it must be Fortnite. I used to assume a good game would get a sequel in a year or two and have significance game improvements, now i wait a decade or more to get the exact same game but with higher resolution and frame rate and new microtransactions
this is conjecture, but i think the growth of the "indie" tier of games has bifurcated the market and made AAA titles larger and more conservative. makes no sense to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a game concept that's even slightly different from something with proven mass-market appeal when a studio that's a hundredth the size with a thousandth of the budget might make something way weirder and still hit a tenth of your sales goal. it's just not maximizing your return.
The AAA style: open world, someone calling you to tell you to meet them at story quest marker. You can quick teleport right next to the marker. A bunch of markers for side quests. Crafting consumables and sometimes rare armor that needs 10 side quest tokens. The story quest is a gauntlet of killing a bunch of dudes before fighting a boss. Cutscene. New ability. Beat the game. Some kind of movement ability unlocked.
One of the reasons that died is that last gen went from the tech designed to be the most powerful thing available (on PS360) to CPUs that were bad even for 2013 mid-range laptops. Current gen is better but not that much better. Even on high end PCs GPU advancements are quickly outpacing CPUs.
Another reason is that open world has replaced linear as the norm, it's hard to do this shit when it has to be completely dynamic.
Cost of development is way too high, recession means companies are laying people off and closing whole dev studios, COVID fucked up development timelines for a few years. High interest rates mean no more experimental mid-budget games, only cheap indies and massive bloated AAAA games
The US federal funds rate. Basically the interest rate at which big banks can borrow money from the federal reserve. When the interest rate is low you can think of this as meaning money is cheap; there is a lot of it sloshing around to various less-profitable ventures (and, often, scams) because there are only so many ventures to go around and all the good ones are fully funded. This means companies hire more and are more experimental in their aims. When the interest rate is high, like it is now (relatively speaking), companies cannot get money as easily and so tend to clamp down their spending and direct it toward low risk things they are fairly sure will pay them back.
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Its the first time really that the consoles haven't actually differed that much and been backwards compatible.
Like yeah the ps2 could play ps1 games but the jump in graphics was so massive that no developer was making cross platform games. Ps3 was another generational leap but also changed hardware a lot making backwards compat not really a thing and same for ps4.
Now ps4 and 5 are basically the same console developers stand very little to lose releasing their game on both platforms. Making an exclusive for the newer console which sold pretty poorly on both sides with still massive previous gen active user bases you'd basically be shooting yourself in the foot making a current gen only game.
As a business I'd want my game to cover as many platforms as possible so the ps4 or switch is gonna be the base target depending on what I would be making.
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AAAA gaming ->
Slow development times, Lack of innovation,Third person open world game thats 80 hours of bloat has become the standard.
They are almost reskins of the same gameplay loops
12th game in the same series with the next one coming next year..
Sequels are a mistake, I want fresh experiences.
Safe, safe, safe, chase the mainstream whales.
DLC, 3 Season Passes..
A console plus another controller plus paying for online gaming and a handful of games is the same cost as a decent pc 
I'm really digging all the switch games I'm emulating, and I'm playing bomb rush cyberfunk right now which is awesome
barely any games that can't be played on ps4 or Xbox one
One unique intersection here is this:
Dev (say a studio under Square Enix) wants to make game for PS5, dev also does not want to leave 150 million potential buyers ob Nintendo Switch on the table. If dev is already building their game with the Switch in mind, might as well make a PS4 (~100 million consoles sold, probably still many active users) version as well. Hence why so many games have a platform spread that's like "PC, PS5, PS4, Switch".
Exclusives, or even just leaving out lastgen consoles, has never made financial sense but now there's less incentive than ever. See Microsoft had to deliberately cut off its devs from making Xbox One games.
Would be cool if we enter the eternal PC/PS4/Switch generation and never have to buy new hardware again. We've reached peak gaming.
To be real I expected the 8th gen to be long dead by now, but stuff continues to drop on old platforms. I think the Switch 2 will still be low-performance enough that PS4 ports will be viable.
The steam deck specs & form factor is honestly peak. I don't think anything will top it within the next decade, unless VR really takes off
See Microsoft had to deliberately cut off its devs from making Xbox One games.
While simultaneously cutting off devs from making real series x games because of the s
If the Series S had 16GB of ram as well it would have been a fine step-down console, but its bizzare 8+2gb configuration is really bad :> death to Microsoft lol
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PS5 got rid of themes. That one jazzy song from persona 5 used to be the Theme to Babs's Bf's Apartment, but now the best we can get is a spacey wooommmeoooom.
To add to @queermunist@lemmy.ml's comment, the most difficult and costly aspect of video games are the games themselves, which means that there's also an inverse relationship with companies having interest in making them. Perhaps to investors, hardware has appeared like a sure investment, because they've always ignored how important the games are to the hardware.
Since console hardware is converging towards PCs (as opposed to specialized hardware stratified by make), as well as the expansion of the PC market (which has a massive range of hardware of varying price points and capabilities) the benefits of making a game against the limits of a specific console is less and less of a good idea versus targeting a wide market. If you aren't stuck to exclusivity for a single console, then it makes sense to target previous generation consoles if possible in order to maximize the size of the potential market.
Microsoft would love to sell PCs as locked down as Xboxes. That's the ultimate goal of the TPM.
Ps5 controllers are dogshit too, just a matter of time for the sticks to stop working.
I think capitalist consolidation of resources and safe-profit-focussed decisionmakers plays a part. We need more mid-budget games, risk-taking and sleeper hits.
Problem is even when we get sleeper hits, capitalist pigs just end up closing the studio for not being profitable enough
I think people really like the form factor, but everything I've heard suggests that they fail very quickly.
Well you're first issue is expecting games on a playstation, something that hasn't happened since the PS2. Xbox, I'm not sure what their deal is. I feel like they are wanting to get out of the console game and focus on pushing games for windows. Nintendo is the only gaming company that remembers that you need novelty to push hardware and keep games on your console.
Though I think another issue is that there's no reason to make games on consoles any more. Everyone has a smartphone and at least a laptop. 'Gamers' all have PCs with dedicated GPUs. Consoles have expensive development hardware and licensing fees. I feel like the Xbox One's focus on an entertainment center device is the correct way to go if consoles want to continue existing into the future.
Nintendo and PC fanboy. Nice
Nah let people game on what they want to game on. I like consoles because the cost of entry is lower.
The cost of entry for PC gaming is lower than consoles in my opinion. Between buying older games, older parts, and paying for online play, I’ve definitely saved money compared to buying multiple consoles.
I don't think you're going to get the kind of power out of a 500 dollar pc that you would a PS5 though.
Used to be you could, but graphics cards are so fucking expensive now that in 
a decent 16GB card starts at $400.
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A ps5 here is $650, another controller, plus online and a handful of games to play with my wife would easily bring it up to where a pc is the better option
True, but over time it just about pays off. I made the switch years and years ago. A PS5 probably outperforms my PC on new games on Ultra settings, but I can still play all of them just with the graphics turned a notch down. When I want to upgrade I can just switch the GPU out for a better one. Annoyingly though, GPUs have become very expensive.
Anyway, I get mods, a PC for video editing and such, general work stuff, movies, an infinite amount of customisability of hard/software, and so on. I've got a ridiculous amount of value for money out of it. And I could push it further still hypothetically if I used it as a host. My partner could probably do everything they do on their laptop (watching stuff, working), through a second monitor, while I played the latest PS5 game on 'High' settings on the primary monitor.
I loved my consoles when I had them, but I don't think I'll ever go back.
Nah let people game on what they want to game on.
I wasn't stopping you, just telling you what I see in the gaming industry rn.
I like consoles because the cost of entry is lower.
That's fine I'm not judging you for it, but the console is being beaten by other devices, especially smartphones. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo need to adapt.
new consoles push the technological limits -> game dev costs more money and takes longer -> fewer games coming out -> fewer people bothering with buying new consoles when there are so few games -> less money to keep up with ballooning costs of game dev -> layoffs in the industry -> games take even longer to come out
haven't actually looked into the sales numbers to see if any of this is actually correct but it's how it feels vibe wise
COVID screwed everything up. A similar thing occured with the PS2 and PS3/XBox 360 with the 2008-2009 financial crash screwing up the releases. If people can't afford new consoles, there's no point in selling games exclusively on them. Up until 2009-2010, most PS3 or X360 games had a PS2 version. I think Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010 was the first mainline NFS game to release exclusively on the PS3/X3360.
That's because all they had for decades was the anti-consumer practice of console exclusivity. That has been the sole reason for the lack of some games on some of the platforms.
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We've long sense passed the bar of how much computer power is needed for gameplay, and graphics improvements are deep in the realm of diminishing returns. The only way for AAA games to outdo each other now is by ever-expanding scope and budget. A slightly more powerful console doesn't help them achieve that, and releasing on everything at once can help them recoup costs from those monster budgets.
And they're also in the process of porting all the PlayStation exclusives over to PC, making all the consoles completely pointless.