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lLast week, my favorite gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden if he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way forward for the video game industry. Your response It was not what I expected.
“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with that. We have reached the precipice, where the center cannot hold, we cannot continue doing the things we have done before… It is time for a true complete reboot of the business model, of what it means to be a video game. ” said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference.’ We are fighting for teraflops and that is not the place to be. We need to compete on content. If we look at the specifications of the box, I think we have reached the ceiling.”
This surprised me because seems It’s very obvious, but it’s still not often said by gaming industry executives, who rely on the tantalizing promise of technological advancement to generate investment and excitement. If we now freely admit that we’ve come as far as we can with the power of consoles, that represents a major shift in the way the games industry does business.
I also found Layden’s statements to be quite valid, because I simply don’t care about the technical specifications. I’m the least technically minded games journalist I know, and I’ve often felt like I’m in the minority. I would have a hard time reliably telling the difference between 50fps and 60fps, or between 4k and 8k resolution, or explaining what ray tracing actually is. For me, games started looking pretty good about 15 years ago and most of the improvements I’ve seen since then have been incremental. Developers have been constantly innovating during that time, but most of that innovation has focused on themes and content rather than technical advances.
Tech Specs Used to Matter immensely to the players. I vividly remember the arguments on the playground about which was more powerful between the SNES and the Mega Drive, and the discussions on Internet forums about whether the PlayStation 3 had the advantage over the Xbox 360. For me, the end of this era It started when Nintendo launched the Wii. a relatively underpowered console that sold 100 million, surpassed all its rivals in sales and showed that there are millions of players who just want to have fun at a reasonable price. Even 10 years after that, when the Switch was announced, it was mocked for being less powerful than the PS4 or Xbox One, which had already been available for years at that point. It has now sold 140 million units.
Despite the demonstrable reality that most gamers today don’t care enough about technical specifications to base their purchasing decisions on them, there are still millions of people who do attention: these are the customers for whom the upcoming £700 PlayStation 5 Pro exists, for whom Digital Foundry comprehensively detailed analyzes of the technical performance of the games are written. From anecdotal experience, it is most likely the category that most game developers fall into. But I would say that this is now a small subsection of the total gaming population.
What changed? The gaming audience has certainly changed and expanded, but it’s also a matter of diminishing returns. New consoles and new technological advances used to represent entirely new possibilities for video games every few years: think of the difference between the first Super Mario Bros in 1985 and Super Mario 64 just 11 years later, or the difference between the first Grand Theft Auto and GTA: San Andrés. But something as momentous as the jump from 2D to 3D games in the late 90s? It’s been a long time since something like this happened. The main technological innovation of the last 15 years in gaming has been virtual reality, and it turned out to have niche appeal.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the things I’ve seen on the PlayStation 5 have impressed me. The visual detail in games like God of War: Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West is amazing. It’s the speed and power of the PS5 that allowed Insomniac to go crazy in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and place those incredible dimension-shifting portals in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. But most of this though extremely ordered, it is not essential either. If this comes at the cost of studios’ ability to operate sustainably (and therefore at the cost of developers’ livelihoods), is continually increasing visual fidelity really worth it? Is it time to leave that fight behind?
Nintendo has already done it. In fact, its late president Satoru Iwata saw this coming back in 2004. “Games have reached a dead end,” he told Japanese outlet Mainichi Interactive in 2004. “Creating complicated games with advanced graphics used to be the golden principle that led to success, but it doesn’t work anymore… The situation now is that even if the developers work a hundred times harder, they can forget about selling a hundred times more units, since it is difficult for them to even reach the status quo. It is obvious that games have no future if we continue to operate according to this principle that wastes time and energy.”
Xbox also seems to be thinking about throwing in the towel in the console war. Although its executives have said that a shiny new Xbox console is in the works, Microsoft seems much more interested in bringing its Game Pass subscription to as many different devices as possible, rather than focusing on new hardware. PlayStation may soon be the only one left in the technological arms race, and that could come at a huge cost.
what to play
Wilmot is a smiling white cube and is very good at organizing things. After his daily work in a warehouseHe likes to relax at home by doing puzzles and then hanging them on the wall.
Wilmot solves it is a relaxing puzzle game enhanced by the beautiful art of Richard Hogg (Flock, Hohokum) – every time the postman knocked on the door with a new package of puzzle pieces, there were a few leftovers that eventually transformed into something unexpected, such as a snake -playing the guitar or an octopus holding a hot dog. Relaxing and minimalist, this is a good lunchtime game. steam cover.
Available in: PC, Mac
Estimated playing time: 3 hours
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what to read
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2K has announced a new hero shooting game from Call of Duty veterans at the 31st Unions studio. is called Project ethics and given what happened recently with Sony’s shooter hero Concord, I’ll be watching with interest.
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Analogue, maker of high-end modern retro consoles that let you play your old games optimally on modern TVs, has announced its vision for the nintendo 64he Analog 3D. It will play GoldenEye for four players at an enhanced resolution, with Analogue’s signature attention to detail in recreating the look and feel of the CRT TV era. Pre-orders are now open.
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Deadline information that he God of War television adaptation from Sony and Amazon has gone through a bad patch. They are starting over on the project after several key staff left.
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Good news for fans of print journalism in video games: the EGM Compendiuma book compiled from decades of issues of the recently canceled American magazine monthly electronic games, It is 900% funded on Kickstarter.
What to click
Question block
This week’s question comes from the reader. edge:
“This lunch my copy of In It arrived, ironically, along with the latest issue of PLAY magazine, which I had no idea was closing. I’m really sad to see it go, as I was with gamesTM a few years ago. It seems inevitable that the day will come when we have no choice but to search the internet for gaming news and reviews, so could you recommend some websites to visit? With decent quality writing and no toxic, depressing nonsense?
My first job was as a junior editor at GamesTM magazine, and I have a long-standing love for print, although media capitalism has ensured that most magazines are now shadows of their former selves, with reduced staff and fewer pages. (Hooray for the new wave of high-quality gaming periodicals!)
For someone with a print sensibility, my non-overwhelming gaming website recommendations are: VGC, a news-focused site run and staffed by people who have worked at magazines for years; Eurogamer, a long-established British website that still leaves room for extensive reviews; PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun if you are a PC fan; and Polygon, for me, is the best of the US-based sites. Also, I’ve heard that The Guardian has a seeAnd good online games section; You should take a look at it sometime.
If you have a question for the ask block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.