Literally barely any games that can’t be played on ps4 or Xbox one.

This ps5 almost feels like a waste of 500 bucks

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    My theory is that there was no reason to make a new generation of consoles, we have reached diminishing returns. People only need their games to look good enough and be big enough and run fast enough, the new generation just doesn’t matter anymore.

    Then again my primary form of gaming is ascii graphics so…

  • on the 360 playing battlefield bad company i assumed terrain destruction and stuff would be the norm in the future and maps would be a lot bigger with more people, i was too stupid to realize that the most important part of gaming is that the graphics get un-noticeably, incrementally better over time without any fundamental changes to gameplay or possible art styles, everything must be bland and ‘photorealistic’ or else it must be Fortnite. I used to assume a good game would get a sequel in a year or two and have significance game improvements, now i wait a decade or more to get the exact same game but with higher resolution and frame rate and new microtransactions

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      this is conjecture, but i think the growth of the “indie” tier of games has bifurcated the market and made AAA titles larger and more conservative. makes no sense to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a game concept that’s even slightly different from something with proven mass-market appeal when a studio that’s a hundredth the size with a thousandth of the budget might make something way weirder and still hit a tenth of your sales goal. it’s just not maximizing your return.

      • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        The AAA style: open world, someone calling you to tell you to meet them at story quest marker. You can quick teleport right next to the marker. A bunch of markers for side quests. Crafting consumables and sometimes rare armor that needs 10 side quest tokens. The story quest is a gauntlet of killing a bunch of dudes before fighting a boss. Cutscene. New ability. Beat the game. Some kind of movement ability unlocked.

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      One of the reasons that died is that last gen went from the tech designed to be the most powerful thing available (on PS360) to CPUs that were bad even for 2013 mid-range laptops. Current gen is better but not that much better. Even on high end PCs GPU advancements are quickly outpacing CPUs.

      Another reason is that open world has replaced linear as the norm, it’s hard to do this shit when it has to be completely dynamic.

  • SuperZutsuki [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    Cost of development is way too high, recession means companies are laying people off and closing whole dev studios, COVID fucked up development timelines for a few years. High interest rates mean no more experimental mid-budget games, only cheap indies and massive bloated AAAA games

      • itappearsthat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        The US federal funds rate. Basically the interest rate at which big banks can borrow money from the federal reserve. When the interest rate is low you can think of this as meaning money is cheap; there is a lot of it sloshing around to various less-profitable ventures (and, often, scams) because there are only so many ventures to go around and all the good ones are fully funded. This means companies hire more and are more experimental in their aims. When the interest rate is high, like it is now (relatively speaking), companies cannot get money as easily and so tend to clamp down their spending and direct it toward low risk things they are fairly sure will pay them back.

  • Gorb [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    Its the first time really that the consoles haven’t actually differed that much and been backwards compatible.

    Like yeah the ps2 could play ps1 games but the jump in graphics was so massive that no developer was making cross platform games. Ps3 was another generational leap but also changed hardware a lot making backwards compat not really a thing and same for ps4.

    Now ps4 and 5 are basically the same console developers stand very little to lose releasing their game on both platforms. Making an exclusive for the newer console which sold pretty poorly on both sides with still massive previous gen active user bases you’d basically be shooting yourself in the foot making a current gen only game.

    As a business I’d want my game to cover as many platforms as possible so the ps4 or switch is gonna be the base target depending on what I would be making.

  • magi [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    AAAA gaming ->

    Slow development times, Lack of innovation,Third person open world game thats 80 hours of bloat has become the standard.

    They are almost reskins of the same gameplay loops

    12th game in the same series with the next one coming next year…

    Sequels are a mistake, I want fresh experiences.

    Safe, safe, safe, chase the mainstream whales.

    DLC, 3 Season Passes…

    A console plus another controller plus paying for online gaming and a handful of games is the same cost as a decent pc hahaha

  • ashinadash [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    barely any games that can’t be played on ps4 or Xbox one

    One unique intersection here is this:

    Dev (say a studio under Square Enix) wants to make game for PS5, dev also does not want to leave 150 million potential buyers ob Nintendo Switch on the table. If dev is already building their game with the Switch in mind, might as well make a PS4 (~100 million consoles sold, probably still many active users) version as well. Hence why so many games have a platform spread that’s like “PC, PS5, PS4, Switch”.

    Exclusives, or even just leaving out lastgen consoles, has never made financial sense but now there’s less incentive than ever. See Microsoft had to deliberately cut off its devs from making Xbox One games.

  • mushroom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    new consoles push the technological limits -> game dev costs more money and takes longer -> fewer games coming out -> fewer people bothering with buying new consoles when there are so few games -> less money to keep up with ballooning costs of game dev -> layoffs in the industry -> games take even longer to come out

    haven’t actually looked into the sales numbers to see if any of this is actually correct but it’s how it feels vibe wise

  • Babs [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    PS5 got rid of themes. That one jazzy song from persona 5 used to be the Theme to Babs’s Bf’s Apartment, but now the best we can get is a spacey wooommmeoooom.

  • Vingst [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Ps5 controllers are dogshit too, just a matter of time for the sticks to stop working.

    I think capitalist consolidation of resources and safe-profit-focussed decisionmakers plays a part. We need more mid-budget games, risk-taking and sleeper hits.

  • TheBroodian [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    To add to @[email protected]’s comment, the most difficult and costly aspect of video games are the games themselves, which means that there’s also an inverse relationship with companies having interest in making them. Perhaps to investors, hardware has appeared like a sure investment, because they’ve always ignored how important the games are to the hardware.

  • JohnBrownsBussy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Since console hardware is converging towards PCs (as opposed to specialized hardware stratified by make), as well as the expansion of the PC market (which has a massive range of hardware of varying price points and capabilities) the benefits of making a game against the limits of a specific console is less and less of a good idea versus targeting a wide market. If you aren’t stuck to exclusivity for a single console, then it makes sense to target previous generation consoles if possible in order to maximize the size of the potential market.