It really is like a feudal system. There’s a reason why the HBO series Succession is framed like the politics between a lord, his heirs, and his vassals.
Chasing the “best version” is a fool’s errand, though. Unless you’re buying top-of-the-line hardware every cycle, you’ll never have the best. And even then, there are games that seem to target future hardware by having settings so high not even top-end PCs can max them out comfortably, and other games that are just so badly optimized they’ll randomly decide they hate some feature of your setup and tank the performance, too.
Everyone has their threshold for what looks good enough, and they upgrade when they reach that point. I used my last PC for 10 years before finally upgrading to a newer build, and I’m hoping to use my current one as long as well.
But just based on the displayed difference in performance between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, it doesn’t seem like a good investment for what benefits you get. It’s like paying Apple prices for marginally better hardware, and with overpriced wheels disc drive sold separately.
My memory may be hazy, but I recall the mainstream acceptance of the digital distribution model on PC as more of an early 2010’s thing. People hated Steam at launch, having yet another launcher you had to download which was basically just DRM for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike.
It wasn’t until their marketplace opened up and they offered very attractive sales that people came around to it eventually.
The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.
I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don’t think it’s $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.
I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have “Made for PS5” exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:
The Last of Us Part 2
God of War: Ragnarok
Ghost of Tsushima
Horizon: Forbidden West
Control
All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the “better” experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?
The DNA example might be a bad comparison to make, though, when hereditary illnesses are also a comparison you could make to an engine that has the same flaws as it’s predecessors.
Hopefully whatever they do next with their engine moves away from the cells and worldspaces model of their previous engines. After all of Starfield’s criticisms, they need to move away from loadscreen triggers as much as possible.
I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.
To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.