From a publisher standpoint, he states they don’t change the way they think of making or selling games. Which does make sense for someone in his position to say and lead his company in doing.
While a mid-gen upgrade for consoles may be nice for consumers. As they can pick up a console that’s capable of handling better graphics or higher resolutions. Publishers still need to support the 10s of millions of launch consoles that have been sold over the past few years.
So these upgrades might be good for consumers, but he says they’re not meaningful for publishers/developers.
The way I read it, they are saying the gameplay can’t be any different, it’ll just look better on a mid-gen refresh. Which yeah, isn’t wrong, but so what? Gameplay hasn’t evolved a ton since the PS3/360 era, we’ve got massive CPU and storage improvements this gen and it’s not like that’s brought a huge host of gameplay improvements outside of load times. For the most part all we are doing is improving graphics at this point. I don’t know that there are a ton of impossible gameplay ideas that publishers have but are just waiting for powerful enough hardware to be able to build it.
The only thing that’s really blown me recently was Returnal. That gameplay was definitely different than anything I’ve experienced before, just in terms of gameplay, and using all kinds of new stuff like fast load times, amazing haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. All of that made me say that this is a game that makes you feel like you finally arrived in a new generation of gaming. It’s just sad no other game really matches that feeling, apart from graphical improvements.
