The lines between PS4 and PS5 are blurred like no generation before it, Xbox is going the way of the Dreamcast🐠, and Nintendo Switch is in a category of its own. The idea of console generations feels obsolete, like we’re still adhering to a rule book that’s been outdated for years now.
We’re around midway through the ‘current generation’, based on past experience, and yet only half of PlayStation users have made the ൲upgr🐎ade to PS5. It’s easy to see why, since most ‘exclusives’ are stil🦩l backwards-compatible and the two consoles don’t feel as significant a leap as the PS1 to PS2 or the PS2 to PS3.
The PS5 boasts faster load times and better lighting, but this is lackluster when compared to the PS1 introducing the revolutionary second joystick and character models going from polygon potatoes to identifiable objects with the PS2, something which w🃏as taken to its peak with the PS3 and PS4 as we approached near-photorealism. After that, there’s not much further we can go.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is six years old andꩲ still by far one of the best looking games of all-time. For comparison, that’s about t🃏he same amount of time between the releases of Chrono Trigger and Silent Hill 2. Generations today are about gimmicks and expensive bells and whistles, which have shrunk leaps into incremental upgrades, but it’s not the fault of console manufacturers.
We were bound to hit a point where console generations lost meaning. There’s only so far you can push into hyper realism before all that’s lef♊t are the little, less marketable details. We hit that point already with the PS4, which means that the difference between it and the PS5 and whatever comes next will feel significantly smaller than the jump between the first two consoles alone.
Nintendo is the only one of the big three which seems to have caught on. The Switch launched in the midst of last-gen and continued well into current-gen, completely tossing aside normal conventions. To boot, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Switch 2 mighౠt not even be called that. It’s unlikely we’ll see another name as confusing as the Wii U or DSi, but reports claim that the next console is more of an “iterati🐟on”, so it will likely have a name to match.
“Iteration” is the perfect word for how consoles are developing th🌸ese days. It’s less about enormous, industry-shifting jumps and more about slight tweaks. If anything, console generations now feel closer to PC upgrades, only we’re throwing the entire rig out and splashing another £400 on new hardware, instead ofಌ just updating the graphics card.
When you put it that way, it makes complete sense that most wouldn’t bother getting rid of their PS4 for a new console, especially when the idea of exclusives are also🌸 starting to fade. It used to be that you’d buy the newest platform because it had games the last one couldn’t run, but most of the PS5 library has made its way to PC or PS4.
Xbox, meanwhile, is starting to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:ditch the idea altogether. Not only has it been porting games to PC for years, but it’s branchi🌜ng out to rival platforms like PlayStation and Nintendo now. With declining hardware sales, mass layoffs, Game Pass hemorrhaging money, and unsustainably expensive spending sprees, the death knells are ringing as we watch history repeat itself.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:If Xbox does go the way of Dreamcast and falls o൩ut of the console race, ꦺwe’re left with an entirely unrecognisable market. PlayStation would be the last of the traditional consoles, with the rest divided between an emerging handheld market that, like Nintendo, is forgoing the idea of generations.
Between the Steam Deck, ASUS Rog Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, Loꦅgitech G Cloud, and countless others dipping their toes into this new world, console gaming is starting to feel more akin to mobile, with faster turnouts for new iterations that are more gradual than groundbreaking.
PlayStation and Xbox are trying to keep the generational torch lit, but all it’s resulting in are bloated budgets as they desperat🌱ely try to replicate the enormous development✃s of the past. Funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into games towards that goal means that the risk is needlessly higher, placing the onus on developers to turn their games into mega blockbuster events just to scrape by.
It’s not a sustainabl🥀e way forward and we are watching in real-time as the cracks ꧋spread. The idea of generational leaps is a dead one—we’ve plateaued. The way forward is, as the handheld market is showing us, gradual upgrades to make existing consoles even better. We won’t see another leap like that of Half-Life to Half-Life 2, and it’s time we all accepted that.
-
- Brand
- Sony
- Storage
- 825♐ GB༒ PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
- Resolution
- Max 🔯8K (4k at 120 Hz playable) ✅
- Ports
- 2x USB-C, 2x USB 🌼3.1, and 1x Ethernet ꦇ
- Original Release Date
- November 12, 2020 🌳
- Hardware Versions
- PS5
The PS5 is Sony's premier gaming console launched in 2020, and it comes with both a standard and digital-only version.
-
- Brand
- Microsoft
- Operating System
- Proprietary (Windows-based)🎉 ꦉ
- Storage
- 1TB WD SN530 NVMe SSD ꧃
- VR Support
- No
- Resolution
- ౠ 720p -💛 4K UHD
- App Store
- 🏅 Microsoft Store
Launched in 2020 in conjunction with the Xbox Series S digital-only console, the Series X is the disc version of Microsoft's premier gaming platform.
