In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.
I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.
In my country the big box stores are starting to pull videogames from shelves.
You go to Mediaworld (equivalent to best buy) and all you see is a sad shelf with a switch lite and 3 Mario games. Sometimes you see some playstation accessories. Xbox is completely missing.
I’m in Canada and it’s not quite so dire. But I have noticed we are only getting like “main” titles in stores. If I go into a gamestop, their Xbox and play station sections are a quarter of what they were in 2008. The switch is in a much better state with a lot more physical copies (my guess is kids go into stores with their parents and ask for games, so it makes sense to have more physical copies).
I’m really torn because I like physical copies, but I’m also literally running out of living space. Additionally, so many games have patches with bug fixes on day 1. I’ve also been finding online has much steeper sales.
I kinda feel like the shift to online screws us all, though. Idk I’m just a giant ball of being conflicted about it lol
If PS4 -> PS5 isn’t a big enough of a leap for gamers and publishers, then I wonder what would PS5 -> PS6 look like? Is higher resolution at 60 FPS with better ray tracing enough?
For me, it’s just that I don’t want to have to turn the console on with plans to play for 1 hour only to be introduced to mandatory forced updates or show installation times that eat that entire hour away anyway. I just want to play my damn games, not to mention 100% offline if I so choose to.
This has never been an issue. The only forced update at least on PS is if the game is live service online. Stuff like destiny. Otherwise just put your disc in and play.
It’s clear you haven’t used this generation of consoles. They took this feedback to heart and now after install which is entirely determined by your internet connection/disc speed, you can hop into game insanely quick.
For a game I’m already playing I think from PS5 on to actually moving around in game we’re talking like… 10-15 seconds. It’s essentially just making save states. I’ve never seen a mandatory update stop me from launching a game, and it does most install in the background while it’s on standby. It takes longer to get in game on my Gaming PC than the PS5.
This was brutal in the PS3 & 360 era, better in the PS4/XBONE era, and is essentially solved as it can ever be in the current era.
I’ve had the opposite experience and was actually referring to this generation in my comment, specifically for the series X.
With Xbox 360 and even some Xbox one games, I was able to come home with the game and put it into the console knowing I could play it right away from the disc (or install for the Xbox one and play). When I buy a game now, referring to physical copies, I’m unable to play without requiring internet. I understand some games have limitations on disc size, but once upon a time, that’s where multi disc came in. Just the other day I forgot to unplug my console from the network to play a game and was hit by a firmware update request that I couldn’t say “later” to. Once that finally finished, I unplugged but I guess the console already got wiff of an update for the game I wanted to play and said I need to be connected to the internet to continue.
This is definitely not something I ran into with older generations, personally. That being said, it sounds like your experience was different, so I suppose mileage may vary
Yeah now that I think about it, that has been my experience with my Series X, I just don’t use it that often. My PS5 however is much more seamless, so maybe it was just Sony who tried to improve this.
I think a network connection is inevitable during initial game setup, but as PC gaming has been like this since 2008 it’s not really bothersome to me. Bigger issue was mandatory updates, slow launches, etc. which I think have mostly been solved on the PS5 side.
IDK about the Xbox, but the PS5 is not really all that worth it considering most of the games that aren’t multiplatform titles are PS4 titles still. There’s not much at all that requires the PS5’s hardware, so why would most people pay the higher price for a PS5 when PS4 is still being sold and is cheaper?
They literally rushed the current gen out to get ahead of the raytracing fad when it was still nascent, and now Nvidia doesn’t give two shits about it to go play with Gen AI in traffic. This is the first time the industry was in a stare with PC, and they blinked first.
I still don’t see what Raytracing has done for gaming besides marginally better reflections at a greater cost to the consumer. We’ve solved all our photo realism and lighting problems with PBR.
Ray tracing is not a fad though, and reducing it to just reflections is ignorant. Reflections, shadows, bounce lighting/global illumination, etc. all get noticeable bumps in quality. They are definitely more subtle than previous bumps from new techniques because those old techniques have gotten so damn good. But at the same time, those previous techniques have reached their limits and have unfixable problems. Whether that is occlusion artifacts in reflections, light leaking from global illumination, non-interactive baked lighting, shadows with uncanny resolution and no penumbra, hacky ambient occlusion, etc. etc… the problems are all minor, sure, but they are there, noticable, and devs want to keep pushing.
And this is ignoring the benefits on the dev side as well. No more annoying rasterized light placement. And pulling your hair out trying to hack the engine to get the look youre after. “It just works” is an unfortunate comment but holds a lot of truth. Even non realistic looking games will use more and more ray tracing as time goes on because of that. And eventually every device and card will have performance for a full suite of effects. Its an inevitability, not a fad.
Yeah these discussions are hilarious, like watching people arguing about anti-aliasing back in the day. Rerendering the whole scene again? Just to remove some jagged edges? What a waste.
Raytracing is future technology, I’m glad it’s in every game now even if it’s not always well optimized or worth using, because it will make those games age that much better when I want to go back and play them in 10+ years.
The Xbox One is like equivalent to a GTX 750, it's ancient. The Xbox One X is more like a GTX 1060, so should still be servicable. But they are part of the same family, so they can't make a game for one and not the other.
The problem with consoles is that they are outdated the day they release.
I've got an Xbox One X and there's just not been anything on current gen platforms that excites me. Lots of live service games that are of zero interest to me, coupled with subscriptions that end up imposing FoMo.
the theory i hear a lot is that live service games are a big source of this sales slump. If you only play Fortnite, COD, and Madden, you haven’t had a reason to upgrade yet because those games play fine on the current consoles. Even Madden 25 is coming out on PS4 still. Word is that College Football 25 is actually giving the PS5 a decent sales bump, because it is (1) the first college football game to come out in a decade, and (2) the first EA football game that is exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
The difference between each generation of consoles is getting less and less. The latest jump doesn’t really give you anything the previous gen didn’t give you, it just has sharper graphics. The graphics aren’t even that much better.
I felt that way going from a 360 to XB1. More of the same, just shinier. I don’t think I’ve used my XB1 for anything except Rock Band in over a year. And the only reason I felt the urge to get a Series is that so RB loads in less than 10 minutes. (Well, that and Flight Simulator.)
Nintendo and indies are the only things keeping my interest in console gaming.
I think they gave people time to get over the hype and they saw that what they had was good enough. Especially once inflation hit and they had less extra money.
Exactly. It's not like they were gaining much, most games could do 1080p/60fps on the old generation anyway. 4K wasn't enough of a selling point and consoles are mainly used on TVs so there's no point in higher framerate support either. Games looked good enough for couch gaming on the old generation, so as you said, there was no point upgrading.
That’s a cool read. I would much rather play a smaller passion-project of a game than a AAA one anyway, but it’s cool to see markets shifting that way on the large
That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.
It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.
I have started to notice that a lot, if not the majority, of games that make the biggest social splashes in the past couple years are smaller games - with exceptions for titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 which are their own labors of love on a AAA scale. Animal Well, Balatro, Dredge, Vampire Survivors, Talos Principle 2, Hi-Fi Rush…these are the games I tend to hear about the most.
The attention that a lot of AAA games get seems shallow and short-lived lately.
One of the things that’s excited me most recently is seeing new and inventive ways to use graphics and fidelity besides photorealism. Games like Gris and The Artful Escape are probably the most stunningly beautiful games I’ve ever played.
I’m not sure if you could call Talos Principle indie. Croteam is an ancient company (of Serious Sam fame), they sold out to their publisher some years ago (Developer Digital). Wikipedia says 42 people, that’s about the same ballpark as Wube (Factorio), way smaller than Coffee Stain (123), which yes vibes heavily indie (Goat Simulator!) but is part of Embracer Group.
If you look at Developer Digital and Embracer group they’re not really that small – certainly not smaller than CDProject Red, which is very much throwing AAA money at their projects and definitely had their own big business culture fuckups. They’re simply more distributed, instead of orchestrating one or two big projects they have multiple studios working largely independently on small to mid-sized projects. Talos and Satisfactory are AA scale.
Is Wube indie? Well, at least at the start they were, growing with Factorio’s early access. Still independent, as far as I know. Budget-wise they’re certainly not operating on a shoestring, though… you also have to take into account that they’re taking their sweet time for everything. Also AA.
A would be stuff like Celeste. That’s a broad category, I wouldn’t really call anything B unless you don’t have separate coder, writer, sfx/msx and gfx. Maybe toss the writer but anything under that and you’re smaller than minimum demo group size.
All this is to say: Can we please stop dividing the industry into “AAA” and “Indie”. CD Project Red is independent. They’re doing AAA. One is budget, the other is whether the studio has a corporate overlord lording over multiple studios. Game quality is a third measure. System requirements yet another: Factorio has no issues melting your CPU even though it’s highly optimised, then you have B-budget projects which melt your box because the dev has never heard of polycount and a background prop toothbrush has 400 quads… per bristle.
I suppose in my mind AAA refers more to certain group of publishers and parent companies. A certain way of structuring companies and doing business. As supposed to a metric of the budget needed for a game.
I think most do and it’s a good way to look at it. There are definitely companies out there that people don’t think of as indie that are technically independent, so I just wanted to mention it. It’s still very cool to hear they’ve surpassed triple a!
I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.
TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.
I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.
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