In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.
I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.
In my country the big box stores are starting to pull videogames from shelves.
You go to Mediaworld (equivalent to best buy) and all you see is a sad shelf with a switch lite and 3 Mario games. Sometimes you see some playstation accessories. Xbox is completely missing.
Same in other countries??
I’m in Canada and it’s not quite so dire. But I have noticed we are only getting like “main” titles in stores. If I go into a gamestop, their Xbox and play station sections are a quarter of what they were in 2008. The switch is in a much better state with a lot more physical copies (my guess is kids go into stores with their parents and ask for games, so it makes sense to have more physical copies).
I’m really torn because I like physical copies, but I’m also literally running out of living space. Additionally, so many games have patches with bug fixes on day 1. I’ve also been finding online has much steeper sales.
I kinda feel like the shift to online screws us all, though. Idk I’m just a giant ball of being conflicted about it lol
If PS4 -> PS5 isn’t a big enough of a leap for gamers and publishers, then I wonder what would PS5 -> PS6 look like? Is higher resolution at 60 FPS with better ray tracing enough?
For me, it’s just that I don’t want to have to turn the console on with plans to play for 1 hour only to be introduced to mandatory forced updates or show installation times that eat that entire hour away anyway. I just want to play my damn games, not to mention 100% offline if I so choose to.
It’s clear you haven’t used this generation of consoles. They took this feedback to heart and now after install which is entirely determined by your internet connection/disc speed, you can hop into game insanely quick.
For a game I’m already playing I think from PS5 on to actually moving around in game we’re talking like… 10-15 seconds. It’s essentially just making save states. I’ve never seen a mandatory update stop me from launching a game, and it does most install in the background while it’s on standby. It takes longer to get in game on my Gaming PC than the PS5.
This was brutal in the PS3 & 360 era, better in the PS4/XBONE era, and is essentially solved as it can ever be in the current era.
I’ve had the opposite experience and was actually referring to this generation in my comment, specifically for the series X.
With Xbox 360 and even some Xbox one games, I was able to come home with the game and put it into the console knowing I could play it right away from the disc (or install for the Xbox one and play). When I buy a game now, referring to physical copies, I’m unable to play without requiring internet. I understand some games have limitations on disc size, but once upon a time, that’s where multi disc came in. Just the other day I forgot to unplug my console from the network to play a game and was hit by a firmware update request that I couldn’t say “later” to. Once that finally finished, I unplugged but I guess the console already got wiff of an update for the game I wanted to play and said I need to be connected to the internet to continue.
This is definitely not something I ran into with older generations, personally. That being said, it sounds like your experience was different, so I suppose mileage may vary
Yeah now that I think about it, that has been my experience with my Series X, I just don’t use it that often. My PS5 however is much more seamless, so maybe it was just Sony who tried to improve this.
I think a network connection is inevitable during initial game setup, but as PC gaming has been like this since 2008 it’s not really bothersome to me. Bigger issue was mandatory updates, slow launches, etc. which I think have mostly been solved on the PS5 side.
IDK about the Xbox, but the PS5 is not really all that worth it considering most of the games that aren’t multiplatform titles are PS4 titles still. There’s not much at all that requires the PS5’s hardware, so why would most people pay the higher price for a PS5 when PS4 is still being sold and is cheaper?
