alt Hacker NewsPart of what I've always hated about consoles is the inevitable push toward an entirely new generation of hardware when the current hardware is more than capable.
The best games I've played in the last year would run on a PS4 and probably even a PS3 with a little optimization, yet we're already at the "end" of the PS5. It's so disingenuous. We should be squeezing everything we can out of the wonderful hardware we have today instead of chucking it for the new shiny thing, but instead we're force fed a new box, with a new exclusive title, with graphics you can barely distinguish from what we already have and more restrictions on what you can do.
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John Carmack said it in about 2011, if you cannot make your game vision work on a 360 or PS3 you are doing something wrong.
I get that we have made huge strides in rendering tech, but the broad idea behind that I can still get behind.
Other than higher res assets, shaders and cleaner rendering; I havent seen anything that probably couldnt be done on those systems and still broadly have the same overall feel.
The PC is worse in this regard since everyone's hardware is different. There's rarely much optimization going into PC games compared to consoles.
Microsoft already switched its release support to the "series" model. There are still big games coming out on PS4. With the PS6 expected to be very expensive, we may very well see games simultaneously released on the 4, 5, and 6. We may be moving away from discrete console generations. Older consoles still have a massive library you can cycle through as well.
Yeah, the console companies want to be profitable, but consumers are pushing for new stuff, too. I don't care a whole lot about graphics improvements, but going from HDDs to SSDs was a huge improvement and worth the upgrade for me. And software engineers as a whole have long favored requiring new hardware over optimization for current hardware. I hope the great electronics crunch will curtail that.