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kitler53 on 17 June 2016
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Swordmasterman said:
Shadow1980 said:
Yeah. Good luck with that. Console generations aren't dictated by the companies, or by "innovation," or what have you. They don't even make new consoles simply because of "Hey, we got a lot better tech now so let's make a new system." They're dictated by sales, and it just so happened that the typical sales curve of a console gave us roughly 5 years between systems on average, which is plenty of time for a gamer to get a ton of use out of, build a solid library for, and generally get their money's worth out of their initial $200-400 investment. If MS tries to upset the apple cart by forcing a new paradigm (as opposed to having what amounts to one-off instance of offering a supercharged XBO to take advantage of 4K and VR), they can find themselves exiting the console market entirely. Maybe that's their plan. Who knows? But the console generation cycle exists for a good reason.

I don't know why all of a Sudden Console Generations are a bad thing, it seems that people want to get rid of them.

i think not being able to play my ps3 games on ps4 kind of sucks.  each gen BC is a questionable thing.  even with nintendo it is a BC that only extends back 1 generation and to accomplish that they have been showing last gen hardware into next gen hardware which means you are paying for it.

for developers a massive change in specs is a hard thing to adjust too.  rewrite all your engines.  rewrite all your assets.  then you are left with an awful choice,.. you could do all the rewrites targeting "expected" specs so that you can be done in time to release something in the consoles first year on market but then you might "expect" wrong and have to rewrite a lot of stuff.  or you can just wait but then you can't get a game out in the first 3 years because that's how long games take to develop now.

iterative hardware is much easier to plan and develop for.  you always target the existing hardware because it will take 3 years on market before they will be allowed to not target it.  the higher spec model is "unknown" but you can't use the power for the base game anyways just resolution and framerate.  far easier to work in this environment.

for gamers is means all their games are backwards compatible on new machines.  my version of uncharted 4 will work on ps4, ps4.5, ps5, ps5.5, ps6, ps6.5.  i like that.  it also means forward compatibility.  when the ps5 is out i'll probably still be able to play 90% of it's library on ps4 making the urgenty to upgrade much less.  my ps4 won't be supported forever but it will be better supported than the transitions between generations before.

this is also good for developers.  the reset on userbase is hard on games.  do you target the small but growing next gen userbase or the large but shinking last gen userbase?  now they don't have to chose.  you target both.  both consumers have access to the game (a think i think that is good for gamers).  and therefore both consumers have the ability to buy the game (a think i think is good for developers).

 

what i dont' understand is why anyone is soo upset that traditional generations is going away.  the new model has no downsides in my opinion.  you'll still be able to buy a console and play it for 6-9 years before you need to upgrade.  you'll still be able to just put a disc into a console and play it.

 

i dunno what else to say other than i'm excited for this.