The Next Generation of Gaming Didn't Actually Arrive With Xbox Series X and PS5 (theverge.com) 46
A year ago, the next generation of console gaming was supposed to have arrived. The Xbox Series X (and Series S) and PlayStation 5 strode boldly onto the scene, with massive chassis and even bigger promises of games with better graphics, shorter loading times, and revolutionary new breakthroughs. But a year in, and that next generation of gaming has yet to arrive. From a report: There are still too few consoles, and more importantly, too few games that truly take advantage of them, leaving the first year of the PS5 and Xbox Series X more of a beta test for the lucky few who have been able to get ahold of one, rather than the proper start of a new era of gaming.
A complicated mess of factors have led to the next-gen bottleneck. The physical consoles themselves are still nigh-impossible to buy, which naturally limits the number of customers who own them and can buy games for them. That in turn means that there's little incentive for developers to aim for exclusive next-gen titles that truly harness the power of the PS5 or Xbox Series X. Why limit yourself (and your sales) to the handful of next-gen console owners when there are millions of Xbox One and PS4 customers to whom you can sell copies of games? Adding to the mess has been the fact that industry-wide delays (many of which are due to similar pandemic-related issues as the broader supply chain problems) have also seen tons of next-gen optimized or exclusive games moved out to 2022 and beyond. Meaning even if you can get ahold of a console, there are still relatively few blockbuster titles to actually play on them.
A complicated mess of factors have led to the next-gen bottleneck. The physical consoles themselves are still nigh-impossible to buy, which naturally limits the number of customers who own them and can buy games for them. That in turn means that there's little incentive for developers to aim for exclusive next-gen titles that truly harness the power of the PS5 or Xbox Series X. Why limit yourself (and your sales) to the handful of next-gen console owners when there are millions of Xbox One and PS4 customers to whom you can sell copies of games? Adding to the mess has been the fact that industry-wide delays (many of which are due to similar pandemic-related issues as the broader supply chain problems) have also seen tons of next-gen optimized or exclusive games moved out to 2022 and beyond. Meaning even if you can get ahold of a console, there are still relatively few blockbuster titles to actually play on them.
Or you know. (Score:1)
Like all that performance improvement through PCIe 4.0 NVMe's high read bandwidth, which never made any sense in the first place. But people gobbled it up like was french fries.
Other than that, it usually always takes a couple of years until developers take almost full advantage of the possibilities that such a platform offers.
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The reason they haven't arrived in common people's living rooms is that production is low and scalpers are buying up if not most of then at least a significant portion of the production, so only the well-off can even afford one. It's the similar to why you can't get a GPU, though without the pressure of cryptocoin mining.
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Developers aren't "common people" within this context. They don't use regular consoles that they have to purchase on the free market, they use Dev Kits that are allocated to them directly by Sony or Microsoft.
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Better to make a game version that can easily work on both last gen and new gen, then make two different versions that can't justify the costs of the differences.
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The PS4 has way higher market penetration as it is right now. Though I do have to wonder how many PS5 would be out there by now if there weren't any supply chain issues.
I suppose the PS4 would still be a more promising market for a publisher/developer. Since we can assume that PS5 DevKits have been out for a while, it would seem that developers didn't expect it to overtake the PS4 within this first year anyway.
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I can see how that discourages investment into current game development for PS5 exclusively since the release.
I read that Dev Kits have been going out since 2018's, though that's just reddit. Which might be the earliest point where developers starting to target the PS5 platform.
Though there was no Zen 2 back then and no PCIe 4.0 NVMes either.
Proper
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That means that the market for retail games is even bigger. Take one person willing to spend scalper prices for a console. Add retail prices for next generation games since money is no object, ???, profit!
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Unless scalpers are literally putting stacks of these consoles in their basements, they're still arriving in people's living rooms. As far as I can tell, it's also not really true that production is low. According to Sony, they shipped around 10 million PS5s by August. It's currently outperforming PS4 sales numbers at the sam
It was ALL Marketing hype. (Score:2)
The next gen of Gaming will be VR wrapped in some sort of Cloud like GeForce NOW type subscription. You can't expect everyone to go but an RTX - 3080. Honestly it's going to have to work from your phone, cause everyone has a phone. Maybe soon phones will be some sort of VR glasses and not the little slab's we currently use. Thats the future, VR + cloud accessible from your phone, tablet or whatever you like.
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So for a desired non nauseating 90 FPS output with a latency that also 'feels' 90 FPS, you'll need a ping of 10ms, assuming that the processing of the inputs, all the game logic and graphics, as well as the encoding/decoding of th
Re: It was ALL Marketing hype. (Score:2)
What people want is VR that does not require goofy glasses and having to do a constant solo silly dance. We have this now- a console connected to a TV set and wireless handheld controllers.
The VR pushers who keep fawning "VR is the future!" just don't seem to get it, and what got people excited the first time around in the mid 90s was that people were expecting a holodeck like experience ala Star Trek. When they got to experience VR, they were awed for a few minutes, and then went meh and went back
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Expectations need to be managed otherwise things like these tend to happen where people who haven't hit the brick wall of reality already, will fill in the blanks that are left with the most positive wishful thinking, potentially without even noticing, and then be befuddled if things don't work out the same image they pictured in their mind.
Though I do believe that we could potentially get close, keeping the wearable gadge
By your logic, eBikes are the next gen cars! (Score:4, Insightful)
The next gen of Gaming will be VR wrapped in some sort of Cloud like GeForce NOW type subscription. You can't expect everyone to go but an RTX - 3080. Honestly it's going to have to work from your phone, cause everyone has a phone. Maybe soon phones will be some sort of VR glasses and not the little slab's we currently use. Thats the future, VR + cloud accessible from your phone, tablet or whatever you like.
I'll take that bet. I am a lifelong gamer and know many gamers as well. Few WANT to game on a phone. Phones suck, regardless of hardware. I doubt many people have a perfectly good 55" or above TV in the room and are saying...Nah, turn off the TV. I am just going to play this on my phone. VR + cloud are expansions of market, not revolutions...similar to mobile or casual gaming. The tent is expanding to these new realms and they are interesting supplements, not replacements. They won't take over. They are not the future. Similar to how eBikes are exciting and generate a lot of buzz, especially for those of us living in cities, but yeah...Tesla is not afraid of them, nor is Ford, Honda, or Toyota. No one would say eBikes are the future of cars. They serve a different market.
Why am I so confident? VR has been around in some form or another for 30 years. The Occulus is almost 6 years old now. If VR was so good, someone would have a killer app by now. VR is much more like Kinect. When we use our imagination, we can picture glory...of which we're patiently waiting for it to come However, there was never a Kinect game that set the world on fire and became a huge hit. In contrast, take FPS (3D shooters). Within 5 years, they went from having the first game ever release to it being one of the most popular genres in PC gaming and still is today. Even with their overwhelming success, I'd hesitate to call them "the future of gaming." I think the EA sports games outsell all but the top FPSs today. The top sellers on any list are actually quite diverse, not dominated by a single genre.
Put simply, VR...if it was meant to be a hit, they would have had one by now. There would be some AMAZING game that would inspire people to run out and buy headsets. Cloud gaming? I don't see it. It's been out for a few years, so we'd see real success by now if there was serious potential. In the end, most people want to sit comfortable on a sofa or at a computer desk and unwind to a big immersive screen. Games on a phone are for when you're stuck somewhere and the phone is the only option. Even if I am wrong and all the Gen Z and younger think "fuck your big TV, I want to play my game on a 5" screen", what games could you really stream well with our internet infrastructure, which IS NOT GETTING BETTER anytime soon in the USA? If it's low res and low framerates, a mobile device can already render it. If it's high res and framerates, the bandwidth is too low or the latency is too high in nearly every home in America. You can't even pay more for good enough internet for game streaming in nearly every market.
I am sure far more people than I anticipate would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a shitty cloud gaming experience, but in the end, the consoles will sell well and most will prefer them. Cloud gaming doesn't actually add anything to the experience. They aren't running future generations of GPUs that allow amazing ray-traced experiences you can't get today. It just allows you to do what a console already can, on a weaker device.
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I'll take the bet regarding VR. "If it was meant to be a hit, they would have had one by now?" There have been tons of hit VR games. I didn't find up to date sales numbers in a quick search, but according to this report [spglobal.com] from more than a year ago, Beat Saber and Half Life Alyx had each sold well over $60 million. Headset sales are exploding. IDC reports [idc.com] that Q2 2021 sales were up 126.8% compared to the previous year.
Until you try it, you can't appreciate how revolutionary it is. VR is the first technol
I'd love to be wrong - is it 3DFX or 3DTV? (Score:2)
I'll take the bet regarding VR. "If it was meant to be a hit, they would have had one by now?" There have been tons of hit VR games. I didn't find up to date sales numbers in a quick search, but according to this report [spglobal.com] from more than a year ago, Beat Saber and Half Life Alyx had each sold well over $60 million. Headset sales are exploding. IDC reports [idc.com] that Q2 2021 sales were up 126.8% compared to the previous year.
Until you try it, you can't appreciate how revolutionary it is. VR is the first technology in years that really feels like a new generation in gaming. Playing games on a PS5 just isn't that different from a PS3. The graphics are better, but you stop noticing that after a few minutes. The game play has hardly changed. But put on a VR headset, and suddenly you're experiencing something totally new.
I'd love to be wrong, but still not seeing it. TBH, I haven't played Half Life Alyx, so perhaps playing it will make me see your enthusiasm. However, it's also almost 2 years old now. If this was a revolutionary hit, headsets would be flying off the shelves. You say sales are exploding by 127% year over year, but given that they started from a low number, that's really not meaningful to anyone who understands statistics.
Also, I am not so sure VR is THAT much different than typical 3D games, so I am n
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You're making several different apples-to-oranges comparisons. Like saying VR has been around for 30 years. I don't know what you mean by that. QuicktimeVR, which was just software for displaying panoramas? Maybe the VirtualBoy, which most people have tried hard to forget ever existed? (But that was still less than 30 years ago.) Anyway, the modern age of consumer VR is only about five years old. The Rift, Vive, and PSVR were all released in 2016, and they were a dramatic leap from anything that had
The hardware in the PS5 and XBone2 (Score:2)
People forget how underpowered the PS4/XBone1 were, given when they came out. These console were based on silicone from AMD's dark times, when the best they could do was hang at the low end on price (e.g. the FX-6300). The games we got out of them were herculean efforts at optimization and multi-core progra
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*Though I do agree that GPU, CPU, and RAM are quite a big deal, which does bring them quite on par to PC levels of performance, but with the benefit for developers to optimize for a platform with a unified hardware scheme.
From that perspective I found it always attractive to develop for consoles, though personally I just prefer the openness of PC.
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Like all that performance improvement through PCIe 4.0 NVMe's high read bandwidth, which never made any sense in the first place.
Precisely what makes no sense about streaming content without needing to load a level into RAM?
But people gobbled it up like was french fries.
You sound like a buggy whip manufacturer confused by the internal combustion engine, not understanding the benefit of a technology and too ignorant to see multiple example games where it has already been used, not to mention the fact that the same technology is right there on you PC (assuming you have Windows 11 of course).
Other than that, it usually always takes a couple of years until developers take almost full advantage of the possibilities that such a platform offers.
Speaking of not understanding things, there's a big difference between taking full advantage
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Then you see the PS5 with 448GB/s memory bandwidth compared to the 7GB/s peak that you can get from the SSD. It's a joke that's lost on people.
You sound like those people who believe that AMDs resizable BAR will make RAM obsolete, forgetting that the data will have to pass through the PCIe bus. Stop swallowing the market BS and start to think
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It makes no sense because the bandwidth you get even on a PC DDR4 RAM and a 'last gen CPU memory interface' vs a PCIe 4.0 SSD the bandwidth of the RAM is 10 higher.
Then you see the PS5 with 448GB/s memory bandwidth compared to the 7GB/s peak that you can get from the SSD. It's a joke that's lost on people.
Here's a joke for you: "Q: What's incredibly stupid? A: Fazig thinking his 16GB of video RAM compares to the 850GB SSD of the PS5, or the size of a modern game level."
It's really funny because it's almost like you pretend loading screens don't exist and somehow don't even remotely understand the problem being solved.
You sound like those people who believe that AMDs resizable BAR will make RAM obsolete, forgetting that the data will have to pass through the PCIe bus.
*sigh*. Clearly you have no idea how data moves in a system. Hint: PCIe is not the bottleneck.
At best texture streaming gets a little bit more fluent and load times get lower
Are you suggesting that textures are the only thing which need to be loaded into the GPU RAM? Man a
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If you know a better qualified source, don't hold it back.
Note that the person in the video doesn't pretend that it'll increase performance (which is what I'm all about in my posts).
The only thing that's performance related would be reducing CPU overhead, which in these times of having mainstream processors with 16 logical cores should not be a big issue except in some fringe cases.
Unreal Engine has been supporting various streaming met
Re: Or you know. (Score:2)
The latest bunch of consoles are a lot weaker hardware wise compared to PCs than they were during past launches.
Death of a theme. (Score:2)
Maybe this means we can put consolitist [wiktionary.org] to rest?
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Not until mice and keyboards become first-class citizens on consoles, and modding becomes prevalent and not simply an extremely rare option. Modding is necessary to solve show-stoppers in some developers' games (I'm looking at Bethesda meaningfully here) which is why people who don't care about mods should care about them.
As long as modding is the exception and not the norm on consoles, the console experience will be inferior to the desktop gaming experience. Period.
Re: Death of a theme. (Score:2)
I prefer game breaking bugs to be fixed before release. Modding and online content delivery just gives the developer an excuse to sell a broken product. I would sink vast amounts of cash into a new first-rate console that had no network support.
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But then again, crowdsourcing the development into a gaming community this way does often increase the longevity of a game by orders of magnitudes. All in all it makes it easier for me to forgive Bethesda for releasing some turd, that's then thoroughly polished by the community with many many customization options.
Though I fully agree on the online content.
These days it often feels like it's
Availability isn't the issue (Score:3)
The PS4 was the most successful system of last generation, and the PS5 has outsold it in the first 9 months of "availability": https://www.vgchartz.com/artic... [vgchartz.com] The fact that there's twice as many people waiting to buy isn't limiting developers drive to deliver on platform promises.
Re: Availability isn't the issue (Score:1)
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"ps5 has less than 2x power of ps4 pro"
When the original PS4 came out its pure CPU performance was LESS than that of the PS3. It relied on the GPU to provide a better gaming experience.
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I 100% agree the article's argument is bullshit. Came here to say that myself and glad to see you and Penguinoflight already on it.
That this generation shares the same broad CPU architecture as the previous gen (and like, almost all modern gaming PCs) for the first time is a huge deal like you say, and changes how the industry has taken advantage of "easy" cross-gen releases.
I do want to poke at your statement that PS5 has less than 2x the power of the PS4 Pro. I'm no fanboy, I'm in all the gaming ecosystem
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The only game developers/publishers that are going to make games before the availability issues resolve are the game developers that are owned by the console manufacturer and large game compa
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Re:Availability isn't the issue (Score:4, Interesting)
These days a lot of games are not platform or even console exclusive anymore. They will come out for both PS4 and PS5, and maybe XBOX as well. So doing something really next-gen isn't feasible if it needs to run on older hardware too.
The other issue is gamers wanting higher resolutions. 4k not only has 4x as many pixels to push as 1080p, but the game needs to have higher poly count models and better textures to go with it. A lot of the gains in performance were eaten up by gamers expecting 1440p and above on their now quite common 4k TVs.
This always happen (Score:3)
Every generation launch has supply limitations. As there is always pent-up demand for the next-gen console that is difficult to satisfy at launch, without putting huge costs on the launch company in terms of held inventory or over speccing production capacity for the long term.
In the current environment this is even more difficult to ramp production, but the production volumes would have been planned well ahead of time with supply contracts going back probably before the pandemic, so it isn't really about lack of supply of chips that weren't planned in ahead of the ramp up in sales (unlike say the car industry).
The delay in the production of new games though was not predicted, and it could hurt the platforms in the next 12 months, as the compelling reason to get a next gen console for the cohort of more casual gamers that represent the majority of console customers are lots of new shiny games they can't play on their current console, unlike the hardcore gamers paying over the odds for a console now just to get in first even if there is only 1 or 2 titles that actually warrant the new system.
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While true that the lead time on these kinds of things would have probably predated the pandemic, there could still be supply chain shocks caused by the pandemic. Those contracts were based on the idea that they wouldn't have to shut down operations for weeks or months at a time and then there was some environmental disasters that damaged a few fabs which aren't the sort of thing you can just rebuild quickly.
It takes a year or so (Score:3)
Unless you are a first party developer or one of the few privileged developers to get early access, real development taking full advantage of the console usually takes a year or two after the console is released. Add to this the challenges posed by Covid and that timeline is likely pushed back a year. Right now a good number of games are likely those that were initially target for the PS4 and quickly ported to the PS5, and the equivalent is likely true on the XBox side.
It is here- Forza Horizon 5 (Score:3)
The next gen IS here. Forza Horizon 5 is the best example I have played.
I played a lot of Forza Horizon 4 on my Xbox One. I also played Borderlands 3, and quite a few other games.
The experience on my Series S is so much better, it is absolutely a generational shift. If for not other reason, I would say that reduced load times have moved this to 'Next Generation' status.
Here is the /. comments, lots of people saying that that the NVME was just hype. I disagree.
I used to play FH4, and from a cold start, it would take over 5 minutes and a few button presses along the way before I could be driving in the game. And each race took a huge amount of time to load. Even just finishing a race, was a huge load time as the open world was re-loaded.
Now I can go from my Series S being turned off, to racing in the game in maybe about 10-15 seconds. This solved one of the biggest problems I had with the last generation of gaming and it makes me want to play games again.
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It's been a year (Score:2)
There are still too few consoles, and more importantly, too few games that truly take advantage of them,
Seems every generation of console, everyone forgets how long both the console lifecycle is and the development cycle for AAA console titles. Not to mention we has some unplanned global "fun" leading up to their release that is still ongoing and has impacted schedules for pretty much everything on the planet. It's really early to be throwing in the towel on these next-gen features. Let's circle back in 2023 and if there are still few games taking advantage of them, then yea, we have a problem.
Already here (Score:2)
The next generation of gaming is here, and has been here for at least a year, and I tell everyone about it that I can and few people really listen to me, which is usually how it goes when I try a new technology and realize its potential: VR. The next gen is high-performance VR. The recent headsets with full body tracking are 100% more immersive, to the point where I don't want to play any non-VR games now. It's already comfortable enough, stable enough, affordable enough, for more hardcore players to get in
New generation of console without new games (Score:2)
People are nuts (Score:2)
The PS5 has literally outsold PS4 throughout it's lifespan DESPITE THE SHORTAGES. No, I am not comparing PS5 vs PS4 now. I am comparing "PSx 3, 6 and 12 months since launch".