Just to be clear right of the bat I don't mean guilty in a "take them to court" kind of way, but that just maaybe they made some promises they couldn't quite keep, specifically in regards to console performance. First of all (and probably the biggest sinner in this category) there's the initial reveal of Project Scarlett in 2019 which made some very lofty promises I think many honestly forgot. I can't get the timestamp to work here but skip to around 90 seconds.

So the first thing we heard about this system was 120 FPS, 8K... Okay dude.

This was of course long before the actual system release and they did dial it back a bit when we got closer, eventually giving us a full spec run down on both Series X and S including performance targets:

So these were the targets shortly before launch and I'm sure some games have lived fully up to them, but if we look at Xbox's biggest 1st party titles since launch: Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5 and now Starfield, none of them have had these as their default or reached it without compromises. Halo fell short on the Series S and had only dynamic 4k resolution on the Series X, Forza can reach 4K 60 fps but only in performance mode in exchange for lowered graphics and Starfield now seems to be launching without a 60fps option at all (2.5 years into the generation).

As for Sony I feel like I saw some promises of a similar nature for the PS5, but I can find suprisingly little about the consoles actual target performance between reveal and launch. The one thing I can find however is a very early Wired interview that casually throws in that the console will support 8K graphics: https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/ once again: Okay dude.

So yeah, some lofty promises were definitely made both early and closer to launch, and at the very least I would say that 8K should never have been thrown around as both console manufactures must have known that was a pipe dream. I think the problem is (and arguably has been since the Gen 8 mid-gen consoles) that they felt they needed these higher numbers to sell people on these systems, but the reality is the games themselves are also getting significantly more demanding due to higher density, higher poly counts, more advanced physics etc. The PlayStation 3 could do 1080p and in some cases 60 fps and honestly we haven't gotten that far since then in terms of actual performance because it's just running the games themselves that have taken up most of the extra power. And that's not a bad thing at all imo, but it feels like maybe they conveniently forgot that when they were trying to hype up these new systems and what they could do. Not saying that's a first in the history of consoles, but that doesn't necessarily make it any better.

For the record I'm not really a big performance or graphics affectionado myself or anything, but I know some people on here are and regardless it is perhaps worth discussing if the current gen systems really are falling short on their promises and if so whether they simply overestimated them or consciously overhyped them.

No. They're companies. They market a product, make money and keep thousands of people employed.

Are consumers guilty of once again keeping unrealistic expectations and spending money unnecessarily? I can only say I'm as surprised by this generation so far as I am impressed, which is very little. Probably because most of 2015-2016 felt absolutely no different.

If you truly believed you'd be buying a console that would play massive open-world next-gen titles at 4k60fps without setbacks, you were simply dreaming. It's only natural to expect these companies to try and sell you on these lofty visions, but if you want to know what you're buying you should wait to actually see the product in reality before paying up and complaing you've been given a rough deal.

That being said, I don't think there's much wrong with either system as is. They both do the job for a modern console, as far as performance goes at least. Series S maybe a bit more disappointing, but I haven't followed it much.

up to 120 fps: there are a few 120-fps-games... check!

8K capability: the Series X can output a 8K-signal up to 60 Hz... check!

It's not their fault if some people expect those extremes for Triple-A-games instead of lightweights like "The Touryst".

Overall, I was expecting more from Xbox series X giving the higher price tag and the "most powerful console ever" marketing. But so far, whenever I look at MS exclusives, I am rarely impressed and we're not early in the generation anymore, I never expected 120 FPS@4k but I was expecting their first party studio games to be of higher quality giving the promise of the graphical powerhouse that comes built in the higher price tag, and not just necessarily because of MS's marketing.

And to be clear, I am not saying their first party studio games look bad, they're just not as impressive as what the competition has been offering on a cheaper console. Let's see what happens with cross-gen titles become scarce. 

I mean yeah, but being able to pull off either of the two in some cases only means they weren't lying, it doesn't mean it wasn't misleading. I get that tech savy players would be skeptical ofc, but you can't expect everyone to have enough knowledge about these things to know it's too good to be true (for the games they will most likely end up playing). It mostly comes off as an empty buzzword, 4K had already been done (albeit somewhat poorly) by the mid-gen systems so they probably felt they had to throw out 8K to get people's attention.

In all honesty, it isn't like this turn of event comes in as a surprise to most people on this forum. It already came mind-boggling as to why they even talked about features that 99% of the customer base would not experience since 8K, 120hz refresh rate TV's are mostly inaccessible them.

They are every generation. That's been the power race every console generation even as far back as the Intellivision. They always overhype and overpromise. Remember blast processing? PS2 promised it could run the Matrix or control nukes? 70 million polygons a second? Sure made the Nintendo figure of Gamecube 6-12 million seem weak tho in reality Gamecube was more powerful. Cell Processor will be in your toaster! Everywhere! PS3 almost not having a GPU but 2 cell CPUs. 1080P games PS3! Xbox One so powerful it's the one box you need for everything! The next Water Cooler! I'm leaving a lot out but since the early 80s console makers have done this. Just at some point, Nintendo stopped. (Starting with Wii) because they knew. They had to highlight features instead. Tho check out early Ultra 64 hype where at some point the console codename was Project Reality and there are videos way over-promising in visuals what N64 was capable of. Because SGI computers were the thing every visual effects house used and Nintendo going with SGI boy howdy did they over promise that thing.

We were going to get the same graphics as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park!

I don't think Sony overhyped their console TBH.

The Dualsense has been an absolute revelation. Even a feature like haptic feedback has slowly grown on me. My excitement for a game goes up if it has good to great utilization of its features. Load times, performance options on first party games, cadence and quality of releases, technical showpieces, the PlayStation 5 feels like a much bigger jump generation to generation, than the PlayStation 4 was by a significant margin.

Maybe the Xbox a bit. After that Hellblade trailer everyone expected to be wow'd big time but it's still far off three years later while multiplats have been mostly the same or inexplicably worse than the PS version.

DS is nice and all but a quick way to kill the triggers. I turned all that off but you are right PS5 is a bigger jump than PS4 was from PS3. Esp considering the CPU in PS4 and XBO were terrible then. They were mid-range laptops at launch.