Why is the 9th gen of consoles so.... barren...
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
93 comments
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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...
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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.
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Only real leap I see this time is load times and maybe the frame rate is a bit better in some games.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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But then they also do those things badly (thinking of the Suicide Squad GaaS here).
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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.
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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
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Forgive me, I’m a dummy. High interest rates on what?
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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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This ps5 almost feels like a waste of 500 bucks
that's cause it is
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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
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I'm really digging all the switch games I'm emulating, and I'm playing bomb rush cyberfunk right now which is awesome
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I WANNA KNOW YOUR NAME (wanna know) (wanna know) (wanna know) WANNA KNOW YOUR NAME
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Problem is even when we get sleeper hits, capitalist pigs just end up closing the studio for not being profitable enough
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That's interesting, I've always heard the controller is the best part of the PS5
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I think people really like the form factor, but everything I've heard suggests that they fail very quickly.
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Companies realized that making things feel cool costs more money
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm not even going to bother buying a PS5.
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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.
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And they're also in the process of porting all the PlayStation exclusives over to PC, making all the consoles completely pointless.
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videogames as the youngest of all media is obviously going to get hit the hardest by capitalism draining it of its lifeblood for the last few percentages of profit. the only thing that has seen actual progress in videogame design is how "engaging" (or psychologically manipulative and addictive) they can make them and for that you don't need any technological prowess (although the idea of technological progress leading in any linear way to more innovation has always been suspect to me, gamers only being able to imagine "more destruction" and "better ai" as markers of progress seems emblematic of that fact)
if games like the newest god of war (ostensibly a serious story driven game) needs a seven people "player investment design team", celebrated games like "death stranding" are gamified like any mobile or clicker game and even indie devs make "pls lobotomize me for the next thirty minutes" stuff like vampire survivors you can basically give up on the medium. there's no ambition in any of these companies that goes above "we need to get those engagement numbers up". and if engagement is the goal, it's stupid to make more games than you need to. you can only play one game at a time.
the only devs i have any interest in nowadays are fromsoft and nintendo (and that's only the nintendo that makes mario and zelda games) and maybe the occasional indie game (although they mostly suck too)
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Stay away from Nintendo tbh. That's my favorite company.
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93 comments