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curl-6 on 04 September 2017
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EricHiggin said:
curl-6 said:

PS3/360 were expensive at first, but they came down in price over time. And 360's reliability problems weren't the inevitable result of its power.

Sure, in retrospect if they'd been weaker but cheaper MS/Sony may have made more money, but then we wouldn't have gotten games as jaw-dropping as we did last gen, not just in terms of graphics, but also in terms of other aspects made possible by more power, like physics, world scope and complexity, AI, etc.

Well PS3 was $500 and $600. XB360 was $300 and $400. For 2005/2006, PS3 was expensive, but 360 was affordable. The prices did come down reasonably fast, but because of things like PS3 removing BC. Your right, 360's performance wasn't the sole reason for the red ring, but it was part of the entire XB vs PS battle royal that was about to begin. The fact that MS decided to create the 360 themselves for the first time, and get it out well ahead of the PS3, was a mistake. They should have either delayed the launch, tweaked and backed off the performance a bit, or relied more on third party engineering.

I agree the games would have been worse than they were, but how much better than 6th gen is good enough? If we would have had PS3 (and 360) around 125Gflops, that still would have been a 21X improvement over the PS2, and it still would have been more than enough to satisfy everyone. Looking back, sure, nobody wants to assume having something worse would have been better, but that sometimes can be the case, in terms of the bigger picture.

I for one don't care all that much that the jump from PS3 to PS4 wasn't as large in terms of Flops. My worry is that over time, as the improvements become less and less, selling new consoles to casuals will become much harder. Mid gen upgrades helps this situation for now. For all we know, PS wants hardware upgrades to become a lesser yearly/bi-yearly thing, so they can focus on online and digital services instead of physical hardware. I know they have said thats not the case and that gens aren't going away, but console marketing, especially as of late, says a lot that is only partially true, or flat out false.

If you halved PS3 and 360's power, then games wouldn't just be graphically worse, they'd also be reduced in terms of physics, world size, characters on screen, AI, things that have an impact on gameplay. And sure, maybe we wouldn't know better if that's how it happened, but given the known quantity of what we did get, I wouldn't change it.

Reaching the point of diminishing returns in graphics was always going to happen eventually, trying to postpone it would be only putting off the inevitable. While I will miss the days of mind-blowing visual leaps, there is still room to grow in other ways; a new wave of hardware with strong CPUs for example could bring a generational leap in the complexity of game worlds and simulation, which could in itself be as exciting as any graphical jump.