Game consoles are now smartphones, and that's okay

jordanlund , 4 hours ago

It’s not quite the same thing… Mid generation refreshes are, generally, due to changes in technology outside of gaming.

Look at the first mid-gen refresh… The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD for TurboGrafx (released as a separate machine called the Turbo Duo).

CD technology changed gaming, but the console makers at the time weren’t ready yet for a new generation.

Sega and NEC refreshed the current gen with CD technology, Nintendo explored it with Sony, and abandoned it (as Nintendo is generally always a generation behind), which led directly to the Playstation a few years later.

We saw it again in the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Those machines launched in 2005/2006. A global financial crisis took all the air out of the room and made financing R&D for a next generation impossible just when it needed to start ramping up in 2008/2009.

So what Microsoft and Sony did was pivot to try to enter the casual market that the Wii dominated by releasing Kinect and Move respectively in 2010, when a new console SHOULD have launched but did not.

The next true generation was still 3 years away at that point, but Kinect and Move let them limp along until they got there.

The same thing happened with the Xbox One and PS4, television technology greatly advanced after they launched in 2013 and it became apparent that all these 4K television owners were looking for 4K content.

Nobody was prepared to launch a new console, so we got the Xbox One S without 4K gaming, but with a 4K Blu Ray drive, the PS4 Pro, which had no 4K drive, but kinda, sorta on a good day, could almost do 4K gaming, and the Xbox One X which ran 4K games, 4K movies, and massively upgraded older non-4K games.

For the PS5 Pro? There is nothing demanding the refresh. Sony says they’re doing it because players want better frame rates, but those 3/4 of players choosing performance mode are already showing they don’t care about fidelity.

Moreover, the latest thinking is that for GTA6, the promise of increased frame rate STILL won’t be a reality.

rockstarintel.com/gta-6-60-fps-ps5-pro-struggle/

So what’s the point?

acosmichippo , 4 hours ago (edited 4 hours ago)

game consoles won’t be “smartphones” until there’s way better backwards/forwards game compatibility.

all-knight-party , 4 hours ago

Are you saying that phones have good backwards compatibility? I do still remember the big iOS cleansing of 32-bit games and apps alongside older Play Store apps being hidden from you due to being developed for "a previous version of android"

ampersandrew , 4 hours ago

Yeah, consoles have way better backward compatibility than phones.

acosmichippo , 2 hours ago (edited 1 hour ago)

better practical compatibility for sure. Of course not literally the entire back catalog of old legacy smartphone apps are still supported but probably like 99.999% of apps people still use are supported on 99.999% of phones people use. 32-bit app devs have had 10 years to update to 64 bit, and most managed it within the first couple. Also the kind of major compatibility jump as with 32bit>64bit should be fairly infrequent, not like every console hardware generation.

compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.

missingno , 41 minutes ago

compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.

But that isn't the case anymore, and I expect it never will be again. This generation's transition period has been so heavily reliant on backwards compatibility. Hell, plenty of titles still just launch on PS4 since PS5 can run it anyway.

The only exception has been the Switch, and that's because it was necessary just this once to break away for a new architecture. I can almost guarantee Switch 2 will be an evolution of Switch 1.

At this point the big three are locked into their current architecture. They need backwards compatibility, if a new console ever tries to break from that it will flop as a result.

all-knight-party , 40 minutes ago

True, any lost compatibility is usually due to the devs ceasing support and not because of the OS' limitations.

missingno , 33 minutes ago

If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.

aciDC14 , 3 hours ago

Why not just make them mini-PC’s at this point?

KomfortablesKissen , 3 hours ago

They already are. Just shut off from unauthorized (read:your) grubby hands.

aciDC14 , 3 hours ago

Man, how lame.

KomfortablesKissen , 2 hours ago

It is. I really like the direction of the steam deck. A PC that’s very open, but still is able to hide most complexity from users that don’t care for that.

B0NK3RS , 2 hours ago

I’m not sure how I feel about mid-gen upgrades.

I’m all for something like the PS2/PS3 slim or Xbox 360/One S but a PS4/5 pro and One X just don’t interest me.

I also kind of despise the whole smartphone upgrade path that is the norm nowadays so I really hope consoles don’t continue the same way.

missingno , 51 minutes ago

I figure we're coming to the end of discrete generations sooner or later. We're 4 years into the PS5's lifespan and plenty of games still launch on PS4 because they don't need PS5 hardware, and PS5 will run them anyway.

It doesn't make sense to upgrade to a PS5 Pro if you've already got a base PS5, just as it doesn't make sense to buy a new smartphone every year. But I can see the idea being that whenever you feel due for an upgrade, you buy whatever the current model is.