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.
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 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The problem with consoles is that they are outdated the day they release.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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