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The article author honestly made a very valid point, but wrapped it up with a terrible headline.
I even feel like the PS4 and Xbox One currently serve the use case of being “the cheap consoles”. There are a number of games they cannot run or would run poorly - but for their price point they’re much more of an option for the non-wealthy, primarily in other countries. It’s like it’s all one console generation with no signs of ending, and a varying range of specs.
This. For many people old second hand iPhones have become good budget options, even in the US.
Why not just make them mini-PC’s at this point?
They already are. Just shut off from unauthorized (read:your) grubby hands.
Man, how lame.
It is. I really like the direction of the steam deck. A PC that’s very open, but still is able to hide most complexity from users that don’t care for that.
game consoles won’t be “smartphones” until there’s way better backwards/forwards game compatibility.
Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There’s room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn’t practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.
It’s not quite the same thing… Mid generation refreshes are, generally, due to changes in technology outside of gaming.
Look at the first mid-gen refresh… The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD for TurboGrafx (released as a separate machine called the Turbo Duo).
CD technology changed gaming, but the console makers at the time weren’t ready yet for a new generation.
Sega and NEC refreshed the current gen with CD technology, Nintendo explored it with Sony, and abandoned it (as Nintendo is generally always a generation behind), which led directly to the Playstation a few years later.
We saw it again in the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Those machines launched in 2005/2006. A global financial crisis took all the air out of the room and made financing R&D for a next generation impossible just when it needed to start ramping up in 2008/2009.
So what Microsoft and Sony did was pivot to try to enter the casual market that the Wii dominated by releasing Kinect and Move respectively in 2010, when a new console SHOULD have launched but did not.
The next true generation was still 3 years away at that point, but Kinect and Move let them limp along until they got there.
The same thing happened with the Xbox One and PS4, television technology greatly advanced after they launched in 2013 and it became apparent that all these 4K television owners were looking for 4K content.
Nobody was prepared to launch a new console, so we got the Xbox One S without 4K gaming, but with a 4K Blu Ray drive, the PS4 Pro, which had no 4K drive, but kinda, sorta on a good day, could almost do 4K gaming, and the Xbox One X which ran 4K games, 4K movies, and massively upgraded older non-4K games.
For the PS5 Pro? There is nothing demanding the refresh. Sony says they’re doing it because players want better frame rates, but those 3/4 of players choosing performance mode are already showing they don’t care about fidelity.
Moreover, the latest thinking is that for GTA6, the promise of increased frame rate STILL won’t be a reality.
https://rockstarintel.com/gta-6-60-fps-ps5-pro-struggle/
So what’s the point?
don’t care about fidelity
As someone who hasn’t used a console for gaming since uh, the original xbox, is this doesn’t care about fidelity, or is it if you don’t pick the performance mode you get 15fps?
