Apologies in advance for a Doom & Gloom thread.
I've been thinking about this for a while now. We're six years into the current generation of consoles, by rights we should be getting ready for the launch of exciting new hardware in the next year or two, but it's not really happening, is it? In fact the games industry looks completely screwed in a way I don't think I've ever seen it before.
- Those six-year-old consoles are more expensive now than they were at launch
- The PS5 Pro is already £800, the Steam Machine is even more. Who's going to pay a grand for a next-gen console?
- Games are getting more expensive too. £70 for an AAA game feels mad but is starting to become normalised
- Subscription services no longer look like the future and Game Pass isn't doing the numbers that Xbox needed
- We spent so much time on cross-gen releases that it feels like we've only actually had about three years of proper PS5/Series X games, and half of those have been remakes anyway
- Games are taking longer and longer to make, with a 5-year cycle not being uncommon and fewer exclusives this gen than ever before
- Massive layoffs in the industry almost on a yearly basis
And on top of that you've got GTA6 looming just around the corner, which looks set to suck all the oxygen out of everything else for months. Will the next gen just be based on what machine can play GTA6 the best?
So where do we go from here? It feels like we're already in a slow-motion industry crash and we haven't realised it yet. Sony seem determined to press on with the PS6 but I'm not sure who wants it, Xbox have been firing bullets into their own feet all generation, PC gaming remains a niche. Nintendo are doing OK and have finally got decent third-party support but their "new" console is still less powerful than the ones we've been using for six years. Have we reached a point where sticking with what we've got is the best approach?
Hard to argue with the diagnosis; I certainly don't have any interest or intention for upgrading any time soon - my existing backlog of Games Worth Playing is enormous, and it would take something huge (like Intergalactic being PS6-exclusive) to make me reconsider.
Something's going to have to hit the fan soon - it certainly doesn't feel sustainable.
I guess one question is whether Sony and MS can afford not to bring out a new machine. The "number go up" investment types running the business need a new shiny thing, and holding off on PS6 or the NextBOX is going to look (to them) like surrender, especially if the other one goes first. If XBOX doesn't start pumping those rookie numbers soon, Satya Nadella is going to sacrifice the whole business unit on the altar of Altman.
Nintendo look increasingly like the only outfit with their heads screwed on. Sure, their machine might be lower-power than the competition, but they're financially stable and releasing reliable, interesting games at a steady pace—and haven't had to haemorrhage staff to do it. Plus many of their games, despite the reputation Nintendo have, are well under the £70 standard on Xbox and PlayStation.
The Switch 2 has been getting some decent third-party ports - it's not a bad place to play FF7 Remake, Cyberpunk or RE Requiem, especially if you value portable play - but those will dry up if more powerful machines come out and I'm not sure people would have developed those games for that system in the first place, if that makes sense. Over time I'm sure it'll become like every other Nintendo machine, a place to play first-party games and the occasional indie title, and they're starting to fall back on remakes like everyone else. They're in a good place right now, though, at least.
I have no idea what Xbox are going to do next - I've been a defender of theirs this gen, mostly thanks to the excellent hardware and the fact I've got a LOT of use out of Game Pass, but I can't see them developing anything other than an Xbox-branded PC as their next console and Valve have already shown how hard that is to do at any kind of reasonable price point. That's before you take into account the difficulties of things like backward compatibility and so on. Also the fact that everyone hates them now, and they have no idea what they're doing.
Sony will no doubt plug on, but "Sony with no competition" is the worst sort of Sony and they've shown signs of getting cocky lately already.
A few years ago we'd all have been saying mobile gaming was the future but that's buried under a mountain of ads and microtransactions and crapware these days so that's fucked too, isn't it?
Nintendo are going to do fine. Not being able to run the latest AAA games isn't going to matter if no-one is making any, and the Switch 2 is going to continue to be an excellent place to play everything else.
Someone needs to do a decent gaming platform within mobiles, so that you can go and browse actual games which you can actually buy.
PC gaming is niche? Steam alone has the same monthly active user count as PSN. And that excludes a lot of gigantic live service games that don't launch via Steam.
The future is likely to be everything is a variant of a PC + a novelty Nintendo platform (which is probably also a PC). Because why not? Nobody wants exotic Cell-like architecture. Everything has largely coalesced on a fairly similar platform now. It's going to be a pick-you-flavour of OS thing.
Also, in defence of the Switch 2 - the power thing is true, but it also is insanely performant for the power draw it has. I can see that being a big thing in the future - efficient compute, especially as raw material prices begin to spiral. It'll be fake frames, low voltage CPUs found in the back of a skip, and sub 10 watt gaming at 60fps we'll be hankering for - as we slowly boil to death at 50 degrees in Aberdeen.
I reckon this generation could last another ten years with no real downsides. SSDs were the last big improvement for me, the last thing that really felt limiting on PS4. Now that we have those, I'd be very happy if progress just sort of… stopped for a bit. Imagine what devs could achieve on existing hardware if they had another decade to perfect things.
Having said that, when the PS6 launches I'll be there day one, because this is my main hobby and I'm happy spending £1000 for the latest and greatest. I'm not sure how many others will be, which is probably concerning for the health of the industry.
I think PC might be hurt by the prices though. Gone from the idea of building a new machine, to just keeping my b450 mobo build and getting a new graphics card, to now not even really being able to afford that. Carda are all £400 plus before you hit a worthwhile upgrade for me, and thats obviously still a low end card.
I think that's the crazy thing with PCs at the moment. My main PC system is getting long in the tooth, it's a AMD 5800x CPU and a 5070GPU, with 32Gb of DDR4 RAM. By all accounts, apart from the GPU, that's a 5 year old core combo, that should be way off the pace. I did want to upgrade the core, and have slowly been assembling a DDR5, AM5 rig. I'll then swap the 5700 in and give the older system to my kids. Even with around 800 quid in outlay on the new RAM and CPU, in gaming I'll see, at best a small to moderate performance bump. Productivity, perhaps a little more. But not a generational leap, and probably not even that noticeable in most games (especially eSports or slightly older titles, already running at 100s of fps).
Heck, even my 3070 laptop seems fine. If ever a game isn't running at 60fps, a dash of 2x framegen and it's fine.
There's no technology inbound we need more grunt for - 4k is as high as we need to go resolution wise and I think upscaled 1440p is fine for 99% of people. 60fps is probably enough for a majority of games, it's only competitive shooters you benefit from 120fps plus (and you need a similarly fast refresh screen). HDR is always good, but the current consoles do it fine. There's no inbound tech like 3D TV, or 8k that we realistically need to worry about. Dev times are long enough on the existing tech, let alone needing to scale up again to build assets of even higher quality. Even Nintendo hasn't found an innovation space in controllers (the Switch 2 is fairly conventional). VR is probably on its death legs now (ultimately a tech that cuts you off from your surrounding isn't going to be a mass market proposition) - though I do see some growth potential here from those glasses that you can wear that make it look like you're sitting in front of a massive screen. Motion control. Dead.
The only area I sometimes think is a tangible chase might be how Gen Z and Gen Alpha like their Mecha Chameleon style social event games. The big thing that draws people into a community. Since the early 360 era there's been such a splintering of online communities that you're rarely playing the same game as anyone else (also true on the Society - when was the last time any of us, few of us there are, ever met on the same game?). I'm not saying Xbox were right all along with the "everything is TV" pitch, but you know how people are selling Walkmans and physical books back to the under 20s - I wonder if there's some design space there to make a platform that's event/streaming/community/moments based in some way. What that is, I can't really imagine, as there'll always be a million distractions.
