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Soundwave on 10 June 2024
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zeldaring said:
Soundwave said:

I don't think it's anywhere near that simple. The whole "I've bought a new console/graphics card and now will buy a graphics showcase game to show it off" I don't think even that is happening anymore. These people "upgrade" in the same sense they upgrade their phone for a few quality of life features, but they really don't care about the performance that much. It's "iPhone-ization" of hardware in general. 

It used to be if you got say a Dreamcast, you would definitely want Soul Calibur even if you're not a big fighting fan to show off the system and say "hey bet your PS1 can't do this" type of thing. I don't think that's really happening at all anymore. 

Lots of people just buy what's on the shelf at a certain point because they just want something new, just like they want the newer iPhone or whatever, take it home and then just go straight back to playing Fortnite or Genshin Impact and pay zero attention to an Alan Wake 2 or Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora or Senua's Saga ... zero fucks given. In Japan they can't even bother to show up for FF7 Rebirth, an uber expensive, quite pretty remake of one of most beloved Japanese games ever made, like something is definitely changed massively here. They'd rather play a smartphone game on their PS5? When did that become normal, and how is that just some small thing. It's absurd that this doesn't even get talked about, lol, like "yeah this is just normal now" .... whaaat? 

I think part of the problem in discussing what the industry is now is some people just hold to a belief that "well this is how things worked in the past, so everything will just do that over and over and over again" ... when it's clear things are no where near that simple. 

I don't think it's that complicated at all if you have the money and you game 10-20 hours a week, you want the best performance that's in your budget, and the data shows that people don't buy graphic cards like phones cause dropping frames or being low resolution really distracts from the experience for many, and as far i know graphics cards are not sold in monthly plans.

Because you basically just look at the industry in a fairly two dimensional bland way (ie: Nintendo is same Nintendo of 20 years ago even though many of the leadership positions are completely different, their hardware division is run by a completely different person, and Switch isn't exactly the DS philosophy at all for instance). 

Like I can use a fairly easy analogy here ... 4KTV's are the majority (vast majority) of TV sales today. That must mean people care about the highest picture quality possible and 4K video content ... right? Why buy a 4KTV to replace a 1080p one? And by extension that would mean good things for enthusiast formats like 4K Blu-Ray. Makes perfect sense. Except the reality isn't working like that at all. 

What we see is the exact opposite happening, people are fine with their cable TV still broadcasting in ancient compressed 720p, they just blast that onto their 4K 70 inch screen without a second thought. The majority of Netflix customers subscribe to the non 4K tier. 4K Blu Ray sales have tanked as 4K TV adoption has gone up, even though 4K Blu-Ray is the best quality of 4K content available. 

Why? Because you have to look at several factors (for one, you can't even buy non-4K sets that easily anymore and if you can the price difference to a 4K one is negligible, same as trying to hunt down like a GTX 1060 Ti or some shit ... you might as well just buy a RTX 3060). It's hard to even buy a non-4K TV. 

With the PC market it's even far more complex than that there are a lot of other factors most notably the Cryto Bros. Boom where demand was artificially high for years and then that market evaporated flooding the market with used GPUs at a discount. Sales of the 40 series which is the first GPU generation post-crypto boom really saw middling sales, luckily for Nvidia no one really even cares about that because supplying A.I. companies has become their no.1 business. 

But the sales data shows these people buying these GPUs and next-gen consoles don't care enough to spend another $50-$70 to buy a game that pushes the hardware ... Alan Wake II even won some GOTY awards. Starfield had a massive marketing campaign. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is one of the biggest film IP in the world. Immortals of Aveum is published by EA and had a sizable marketing push too and lots of "finally showcasing the power of Unreal Engine 5!!!" and it flopped. Senua's Saga ... flopping harder than HiFi Rush. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a PS5 only, surely that'll be the next-gen big ticket title that puts up even reasonable sales ... nope. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 June 2024