At that price there would have to be some pretty compelling arguments to upgrade.
Half a generation for up to 40% more raytracing power isn’t worth it.
A full generation for 2-3 times what a PS5 can do? Maybe.
Even then, there would have to be some damn good exclusives on PS6 to be worth your while. PS4 to PS5 was an easy argument, games ran at 30 pretty much all generation, mostly due to a comically underpowered CPU, and now they run at 60.
I’m struggling to even conceive of a worthwhile game that would bring a PS5 to its knees. I haven’t really seen a good argument for raytracing yet. Sure, nicer reflections, more accurate lighting, but we were pretty good at faking those anyway. Cyberpunk and Metro look really nice with the RT only editions, but they were perfectly playable without it.
We should really draw a big line under RT once it reaches a certain level of power, and go back to affordability. Game devs can’t put food on the table just catering to insanely high end hardware. My PC is still rocking a 1060. On the Steam hardware survey, there’s only one GPU higher than the X060 series inside the top ten. Budget hardware has got to be the focus.
Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.
My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.
They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.
He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.
He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.
I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.
And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.
TVs have been available in 120Hz and VRR for a while now. Even my 2017 OLED supports 120Hz, albeit only at 1080p.
That said, I don’t see the need to chase that with more expensive hardware. Any game with a choice of performance vs resolution, I find myself swapping to performance mode. I can see extra frames, I struggle to see extra pixels.
200 million sounds like a lot, but it’s like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.
For all this losing, they’re sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.
And that money ain’t gone yet, there’s for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.
The problem is that gamers say they don’t like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there’s a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.
I think the people that have never heard of it far outweigh the people that have and decided to ignore it. They’re chasing “normal” people, not people like us who would likely have ignored it even if it was a free to play, micro transaction riddled mess.
And “FREE!” does appear to be a key factor in making this kind of game take off. They live or die by initial player interest and retention.
These things are expensive to make, it’s not just going in the bin. I’m just not sure where it belongs. It’s clearly Overwatch’s stunt double, and even that seems like it’s on the wane.