It’s because there isn’t really much you can do at the price point they are aiming for, that’s the reality right now and something MS explained at the beginning of this generation. We aren’t getting big jumps like we did last gen which is why MS went for 2 consoles right at the beginning.
I’d rather MS’s solution of possibly 6 year gens with a meaningful bump in power than a mid gen after 4 years that doesn’t really move the needle. Hopefully we will know more about the next Xbox soon enough to see if that’s what MS is aiming for or if they’ll ride Series X and S until 2027 or 2028.
I think last gen’s upgrades were a double edged sword. In some games they did really well, in others… the CPU bottleneck on performance was real. Both on the PS4 Pro & One X. The biggest bonus was providing these current gen systems with better baseline back compat results due to the patches they received.
I think price also matters a hell of a lot here. The PS4 Pro wasn’t exorbitant. So some of the concessions, trade-offs & limitations of the system were easier to understand & accept (games like Dark Souls 3 with a framerate fluctuating between 35 & 45 fps).
But considering the PS5’s current price point, I expect this PS5 Pro to be way overpriced relative the specs in the machine (& it’s releasing a year after the PS4 Pro did relative to its generation timeline).
Upscaled 4K would never beat native 4K for obvious reasons, but some clever implementations like DLSS can help enough to allow higher frame rates will little noticeable change to the image.
One particular method is to have a higher resolution in areas the player is focused on and less where they aren’t - for example the area behind the target reticule versus the far left and far right of the screen.
It’s one area I was hoping to see more use of in the Series consoles - the tensor-like shaders they had over the PS5 were designed with that kind of upscaling particularly in mind, along with the mesh shading tech, but it doesn’t seem to have been used much.
I guess the calculation is that by boosting the GPU considerably that 1.5% hit isn’t so bad.
But yes I’d be surprised if GTA6 hits 60fps if it turns out to be a CPU-bound title, unless their devs do a lot of optimisation work with PlayStation to hide it somehow… (Not that I expect most of the player base will care about frame rate unless Sony tells them to in adverts)
I don’t think people care about exclusives tbh. Consumers operate on autopilot & buy what’s in front of them based on their habits. Helldivers 2 is a perfect case in point, i.e. the PS crowd has been starving for a new multiplayer shooter for a long time now. It landed at the right time.
It’s Sony’s current year equivalent of what Titanfall was to Xbox a decade ago.
We know the retail presence of Xbox in Europe is pretty bad. I know the pivot towards online buying habits as been huge in NA and I personally don’t really know people anymore that buy their stuff in store, wondering if Europe is behind the curve here and if that is having a big effect for MS’s sales when they literally have zero exposure anywhere.
I know those numbers don’t include all of Europe afaik, but it’s still pretty bad. It’s going to be hard to recover this gen, unless stuff like Hellblade 2, Avowed and Fable really move the needle.
Europeans don’t hate Xbox, they just don’t know about it or about the games it has, as an example, most people i’ve talked to thought Hogwarts was PS exclusive.
The last Xbox related ad here (not counting UK) was like in the X360’s era.
Add that to Phil Spencer’s strategy which has been mostly about reminding people that we don’t need Xbox to play their games and the results are to be expected, they already said this 2024 was gonna be even worse for Xbox sales wise, and next months should be very tough for the console brand.
At this point it’s no wonder they are starting to release games on other consoles, if you asked me 3-5 years ago i would have said it was an absurd and terrible idea, but right now i think the future for MS’s first party studios look brighter this way
Well, IMO the gaming industry is in a very bad place. I think Sony manages to sell its PlayStation 5 consoles at a flat level from last gen to this gen (compared to Xbox which seems to be cratering) but the actual software sales (physical & digital) are nothing particularly formidable.
FF Rebirth is tanking & software adoption rate remains low. Helldivers 2 is a band aid on a bigger problem (including ballooning dev costs) because that same audience can abandon the game overnight if it doesn’t have the expected post launch support (or something else comes along which cannibalizes those shooter fans elsewhere).
I think PlayStation is simply a strong enough hardware brand to mask the issues right now. But in 5 years time the PS6 could be an entirely different conversation (when the people who bought a PS5 have to upgrade, i.e. that’s when we’ll see how strong the console market really is… or isn’t).
Not all examples are equal (like the often cited Sega situation is not at all comparable). If the Xbox division can make more money (including via releasing games on PS5 & Nintendo), go for it. Insofar as the revenue helps sustain the hardware side of the business. Let Sony fanboys pay for my next Xbox R&D.
I don’t even care if the consoles don’t sell huge numbers. I have a Panasonic TV & it’s a similar situation, i.e. great hardware which is dwarfed by its rivals on the global sales charts (it’s not even available in the US).
But if the company sees value in continuing to manufacture the hardware, then it’s all good for me.
GTA will definitely give it a big boost but I’m not sure if it will be big enough to make the consoles peak, Switch 2 will also be there which will potentially hurt the other 2
As for Xbox, it seems while they are struggling with hardware sales and growth, the audience they have there are very engaged
Wow for me the biggest revelation is the staying power of Hogwarts Legacy - that game is still selling well and yet the publisher thinks “nope no more games like that!” (really hoping they mean other devs in their team, and they do a Hogwarts 2 with just light live service elements like new stuff to do regularly, rather than a proper GaaS)…
