Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[Norion]

Chrkeller said:

Wyrdness said:

Upgrades are not cross gen titles a cross gen title is something like Prime 4, Pokemon Z/A and Tomodachi where the game is actively developed for both platforms at the same time, TOTK and such aren't they're just given updates to unlock a higher performance, these games most likely already had the ability for these performance settings and were adjusted down to be able to run on S1. This is far from a cross gen approach it's just a more efficient version of porting up it would be like calling Pikmin 3 or Luigi's Mansion 2 a cross gen title, the few actual cross gen titles are cross gen because they were already going to be released post S2.

Cross gen approach is what you see with PS4 and PS5 where the former still gets new releases even this late on if S2 was doing the same DKB would have still had a S1 version.

Yeah, and I suspect the S2 to S3 cross gen will be quite large, similar to the ps4 to ps5.  The ps5 to ps6 will have mass cross gen.  Games are super expensive to develop, I don't see developers locking games behind specific hardware moving forward.  I could be wrong.  

For the record I don't have anything against cross gen, I mean it is basically the PC model that has been going on for a decade+.  People were upset about Ragnarok and Forbidden West, not sure why.  It played better on the ps5, so ps5 owners should have been happy, while ps4 users could still access the game, everybody wins.  

I could be proven wrong, time will tell, but I don't expect any clear generation demarcation moving forward via sudden change in software offerings.  It feels like the industry is moving towards software working on a wide range of hardware platforms, consumers simply choose their fidelity.    

The reason is it confirmed that those games were developed with the limitations of the PS4's hardware in mind so had to run ok on that very weak CPU and a hard drive so no taking advantage of way faster modern CPUs and SSD storage speeds. Though with big games getting insanely expensive and taking extremely long to make now PS5 level hardware will be plenty for almost all developers for a long time still considering that GTA 6 will run ok on that level of hardware. With a decent CPU and really fast SSD when it launched the PS5 is in a good place for longevity. The one major thing missing for that is good upscaling though big games will still run on it without that, they'll just increasingly often have awful image quality.

Last edited by Norion - on 12 January 2026