Lets talk middle generation console upgrades
polycounter lvl 7
I don't think it's a big secret that there seems to be a hardware upgrade on both sides coming. A lot more powerful and same price as the original. Games will be developed for both (and have to run on both).
So far the rumors and while they are rumors let's just entertain the assumption this will happen (because the rumors are way too specific and come from way too many sources same time to be hoaxed).
Personally I would say this is going to be a tough sell for the major audience that makes their decision right then and there and not the one that does F5 NeoGaf and other sides by the minute. I expected the PS4 to be a hard thing to sell to an audience who has no clue what all the tech specs mean and that really can't see a difference between 720p and 1080p or 30fps and 60fps but i guess cutting support for prior generation helped making the jump. However the expected jumps in technology are rather marginal this time around considering the differences between PS4 and PC Versions are not huge enough to say "wow that's a totally different game" and again less significant for the folks that don't know what tessalation, tex Res, FPS, Image res and all that mean. Especially when your old PS4 or XBONE still runs the same stuff. Let's not kid ourselfs here, despite the nameing and the attempts to reach 4K in gaming, i don't see it happening even with this hardware upgrade, considering that a 980TI is able to run power hungry games beyond 30 fps (barely) in 4K. It seems like they are producing the console now they wanted the PS4 to be from the getgo...after selling 25-30 Million worldwide...a user base that will not jump over.
Maybe iam wrong, but this will be a hard thing to sell to moms who just bought a PS4 for their kids. Yes it is build for the VR Experience, however no one knows how the PS VR will do in the long term.
So what do people think who are in the industry?
So far the rumors and while they are rumors let's just entertain the assumption this will happen (because the rumors are way too specific and come from way too many sources same time to be hoaxed).
Personally I would say this is going to be a tough sell for the major audience that makes their decision right then and there and not the one that does F5 NeoGaf and other sides by the minute. I expected the PS4 to be a hard thing to sell to an audience who has no clue what all the tech specs mean and that really can't see a difference between 720p and 1080p or 30fps and 60fps but i guess cutting support for prior generation helped making the jump. However the expected jumps in technology are rather marginal this time around considering the differences between PS4 and PC Versions are not huge enough to say "wow that's a totally different game" and again less significant for the folks that don't know what tessalation, tex Res, FPS, Image res and all that mean. Especially when your old PS4 or XBONE still runs the same stuff. Let's not kid ourselfs here, despite the nameing and the attempts to reach 4K in gaming, i don't see it happening even with this hardware upgrade, considering that a 980TI is able to run power hungry games beyond 30 fps (barely) in 4K. It seems like they are producing the console now they wanted the PS4 to be from the getgo...after selling 25-30 Million worldwide...a user base that will not jump over.
Maybe iam wrong, but this will be a hard thing to sell to moms who just bought a PS4 for their kids. Yes it is build for the VR Experience, however no one knows how the PS VR will do in the long term.
So what do people think who are in the industry?
Replies
But I honeslty don't see it becoming a thing. I think developers will push back too much. Developing smaller games for multiple hardware setups on phones is bad enough. Do AAA companies really want to do with that for their massive games? They`ll still have to develop for the lowest end of that console.
So for a game like Call of Duty: AW which managed 11.29million copies on console, and a paltry 163k units on PC, are you absolutely sure cutting the consoles will get the PC market to sell 9000x more copies?
http://n4g.com/news/1640158/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-sales-top-11-4m-units-worldwide-ps4-xbox-one-xbox-360-ps3-pc
The scary part is that some devs may target this new hardware from the start and then not only will those with the new hardware suffer the same frame dips and such that we already do, but owners of the original hardware will get an outright crappy and unoptimized version of the game.
Hopefully most studios will just do the equivalent of bumping the sliders for certain graphical features like AA/AF/Shadows/tessellation/etc.
Hopefully this sets the stage for the NX to come in, with people disenfranchised with 2.0 versions of the xbone/ps4. Imo nintendo is the only player that actually treats a console like a console, instead of HTPCs in your living room.
I think people need to stop thinking about these as "new" consoles, mainly because as far as I can tell no one is being "left behind".
It looks like games will come with a high/low mode, sort of like PC games. If you feel like upgrading, great. If not no biggie. You still get the same game, it just looks like a PS4 game instead of a better PS4 game.
i expect in terms of regular games all it means is that there will be some 'hi-quality' mode on offer when the game detects it's running on the upgraded console and has a bit more headroom available. like you can set ultra-detail with PC games. i don't think developers will go all out and lock out millions of potential customers running the old hardware.
1. First person shooters on PC is a very saturated market, there's a lot of really great games that are updated and new ones being released, Counter-Strike and TF2 have 600,000 people playing right now. Also Battlefield, Quake Live, Unreal Tournament, Battleborn, Overwatch, etc.
2. Call of Duty games hardly every go on any significant sale or price cuts, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from 2011 is still $40.
3. Yearly releases don't do as well on Steam/PC.
4. Call of Duty is viewed by PC gamers as a console shooter, with all of the issues PC gamers have with modern console games.
5. There's plenty of PC and console games that do just as well on PC and consoles, Rocket League, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, (probably Dark Souls 3).
So you agree with TidalBlast?
We should eliminate 60% of the market to better support 30%?
At retail being the keyword, PC gamers don't buy retail games. About 1 million people own Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare on Steam.
I'm not saying consoles shouldn't exist, just your market argument based off that one title is silly.
little billy just wants to go down to wal-mart, get the latest game that he knows is going to play on his system and play it.
You forgot living room.
You also forgot to mention because they can be a social activity when guests are over.
You also forgot console exclusive games
Also forgot WAY cheaper entry point
There's SO many more personalized reasons I can't get into, but in the end the consumers voted with their wallet.
PC gaming is a much better option for those who care about the quality of their experience.
If you want the best experience, play the game on whatever native platform it was made for.
Here's some proof:
Batman Arkham Knight on PS4 has a Metacritic score of 87:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/batman-arkham-knight
The PC port is 70:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/batman-arkham-knight
You talk about Compliance like it's a miniscule thing. But if it were worth investing in, it WOULD have been invested in. Currently as it stands, the return on investment simply isn't there. Trust me, most publishers are RAVENOUS about money. If what you said was even remotely true, it would have happened.
BTW here's some projections about the PC market:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/intel-job-cuts-1.3543533
http://www.news18.com/news/tech/pc-sales-decline-for-sixth-consecutive-quarter-lowest-since-2007-1228563.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3012553/computers/horrendous-pc-shipment-decline-in-2015-isnt-going-to-end-anytime-soon.html
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/12/10757134/windows-10-pc-sales-decline
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pc-sales-drop-to-historic-lows-1452634605
So aside from content creators like us.. why would anyone even need a PC when they have an Ipad and console?
You missed the context.
Tidal Blast mentioned we should remove consoles all together because PC's would inevitably sell more if better supported.
I simply asked.. are we sure it can cover the 9000% spread? (or in the case of the 1million steam sales.. the 900% spread?)
I spend enough time on my pc aldready and enjoying my game on the console in the comfort of my living room
(don,t tell me i can plug my pc to my TV and play with a controller, my PC is HUGE and heavy it's also my work tool and i wont be carrying it around the house to use it as a gaming device every night or spend a few thousand to build a new one only for gaming)
As Jacque said I also enjoy he social aspect of it as it can be fun to play couple of round of a game with a friend over or even just showing someone a game, something I would definitly not do if I gotta play on PC.
Not everyone have very powerfull pc for gaming and some of us also use mac which a lot of game don't support.
you would be leaving out a huge market of people withotu consoles.
so no I believe studio should not be aiming on PC only (please?)
As for exclusives, that's a much better argument for PC than it is for consoles. I need muh Stephen's Sausage Roll, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Dota 2, and Stardew Valley. Games like that just aren't on consoles for the most part. Here's an inexhaustive list of PC exclusive games. Kind of long, yes?
There are only a few PS4 exclusives that I personally care about, namely Bloodborne, Dream (not out yet), and Ratchet and Clank (also not out yet.) It's not worth it to me to spend $410 for one game and the promise of two more in the future that might not even be good, so I still don't have a PS4. There are some other PS4 exclusives which are just dull (The Order, I'm looking at you. You've got sweet antialiasing tech but that's not worth $60.)
You can build a cheap PC if you're OK with running things at a lower resolution or at 30 fps. Of course, you can build a more expensive one too. That's a choice that you can make, and having more options is a good thing, not a bad thing. The "sweet spot" is around $550 which can play most new releases at 1080p/60fps. The price difference will be made up over the typical console lifecycle by not having to pay a monthly fee for online play.
One data point isn't sufficient to support your point that games in general are superior on the platform they were developed for. If a developer doesn't rush out the PC version of a game, includes options that PC players are used to having, profiles on a moderate variety of hardware to avoid microstuttering and performance problems, and doesn't remove features from the console version such as splitscreen multiplayer, their game will almost always be a superior experience on PC. The Arkham Knight developers didn't do a good job of their PC port, which is why it was received poorly. A great PC port has graphics scalability options so you can always run reasonable games at a high framerate (up to and including 144 fps for twitch shooters, a genre which simply cannot exist on consoles due to controller constraints), modding support so you can change things that you dislike about the base game (like adding a water slide to Whiterun or unlocking the framerate and render resolution in Dark Souls 1), and potentially decades of backwards compatibility (for example, I still play Starcraft: Brood War and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, both of which are around 17 years old, with no problems.) Multiplayer PC games stay alive for years (CS 1.6 anyone?) compared to multiplayer console games that stay sort of alive for a couple of years, max (Titanfall? Halo? CoD? The Division?!) and then see their playerbases plummet precipitously.
Consoles are only good for fighting games these days, and only barely. I don't think we should nuke them from orbit like Tidal Blast suggests, and if you like your console, good for you, but they're not a good value proposition, nor are they the best possible experience for the majority of games.
Again, Im talking about the masses. Not everyone on a pc has the tv setup. Not everyone wants to. It's easy to use a controller on a pc. Comfortable. But getting a good, simple setup that is also comfortable to use a keyboard and mouse in front of a tv is way harder.
https://dolphin-emu.org/
Just because something isn't advertised well doesn't mean that it's not easy and straightforward.
And emulate an old-gen one?
I thought both consoles missed the mark, when they didn't provide enough power to support 4k, but since I was running a 1080 TV, it wasn't a show stopper for me. I still don't have a 4k TV, but many gamers do now... and I many upgrade by the end of the year. It makes sense to have a system that can run that resolution, rather than stretching a 1080 (or possibly less) screen.
Honestly, I don't understand why a console discussion can not happen, without PC elitists coming in to start an argument. You want to argue PCs are better? Come back when PC gaming isn't flooded with hackers/glitchers, ruining the gaming experience. Or how about all the bugs related to hardware variations? (Arkham Knight anyone?)
Obviously if you already have a Wii U or PS4 this is pretty unnecessary, but my point is that it can be done and that it's actually pretty straightforward, and you also get several of the benefits of PC gaming with the "seamless" console experience and without having to put together a mini-ITX build.
I have a mini-ITX PC that cost me around $350 and had some friends over to play Towerfall and Skullgirls the other day. It was a good amount of fun.
I definitely don't recommend lugging around your EATX or SSI EEB workstation to your couch room to play video games. You'll throw your back out and have to spend time in the hospital.
@THOMASP
there is some chatter about an upgraded XBOX as well. As said in the opening post it's all just rumors at this point but a lot of them are very concrete.
For the PC to become the dream platform, you'll need to somehow unify components. Right now there is just way too much variance in the PC markets. There always will be. That is what makes PC good and bad. Then again, are you willing to only target people who can sink 10k into a beyond Jesus powerful PC? If you do unify those components you end up with something like a console and you are back at the original argument.
Consoles are like McDonald's. You know what you are going to get. You know the experience. You know the game is going to play and you don't have to screw around with a lot of extra tweaks just to run it on your system. Can't we just have both PC and consoles? I prefer some games on my PS4 and others on my PC.
No one has really done that since Crysis. (And maybe Outcast, if you want to go way back.)
I don't think it was unreasonable to expect hardware for 4k. I have nothing to back up my suspicions, but I feel like they targeted profits, for the consoles this time, instead of selling them at a loss, as they did with the previous generation. The previous generations also had hardware that was ahead of PCs, when they were released. This generation had hardware on par with a midgrade PC.
It feels like a business decision, to make consoles more 'replaceable', like TVs have gotten. People don't wait for their TVs to die anymore, before they upgrade, because TVs keep introducing improvements.
We're only a couple of years into this console cycle, we likely haven't even broken the mid-tier quality that they can offer. Look at the difference between 360/ps3 games at launch and at the end of their cycle. The games we're seeing now aren't even scratching the surface, i don't think.
1. PC's are better than consoles.
2. The difference between the two is more than the actual hardware, its the mentality.
3. Getting rid of a segment of the market is not as ideal as helping it evolve.
One of the reasons for mobile success is what? A shared operating system/platform. You can have a hundred different phones and tablets, but they are running android. The hardware can come from different companies, but the bridge is due to the OS. I can pick up any number of brands, and as long as its android I can log into my account and have access to just about the same range of apps and games.
The same goes with PC and PC hardware. That's the mentality that is important. Consoles need to change their core strategy, as right now its about as effective as every phone company coming out with their own OS, we tried that and it was no good.
So the solution is pretty simple.
THIS: http://store.steampowered.com/hardware/
Drop the hardware posturing, let hardware competition join the fray. Already mobile gaming can link up to a more powerful system at home through wifi, already we can stream game libraries onto the tv, already do we have small compact machines that can make use of PC hardware and a more universal platform. The revenue can still come from hardware sales, but its not something they should be locking down in the same manner. The real money maker will be the services, the marketplaces that go along with a console.
Consoles do not have to disappear, they just have to evolve and change their mindset. There shouldnt have to be an xbox, ps4, and PC version of the same game. Just the game itself and hardware it can work with. Whether its bought via a specific marketplace or a shared one doesnt really matter, but at its core it should be playable on all.
@JacqueChoi
I don't mean to nitpick but if you want to see steam sales figures look at steamspy: http://steamspy.com/app/209650
Advanced warfare has sold 1 million units on PC so there is still quite an active market there. Also with mobile games there is data that shows games in the top 100 android/ios are making 95% of the revenue. Considering there are millions of games on the app store, thousands released a day while there are only thousands of games being released on PC, means a far easier chance to make money on Steam.
I still think even the average gamer has a certain sense of cutting edge and wanting the latest experience (in a certain budget) and the biggest sales argument for PS4 was: don't stay behind jump on and get the latest and greatest. Here it is kind of similiar to the Phone market where even people who have no clue about changes want the latest just because it's new and cool and "better". However little the practical use of an iPhone 6+ is over the 5s (or whatever name the Smasung or Sony devices have).
What my main thought is, is: whom does sony think they are selling a PS4k to? Do they think they can pull the same as the phone industry? The phone industry has the pro that they can create a better case for the upgraded hardware. You can put the last generation and the new one side by side and see the difference on the spot. Better camera, everything runs smoother, everything is a bit clearer, lighter, slimer, more stylish, bigger and can do more everyday stuff. The jump from PS3 to PS4 worked in this way. You can put a PS3 game left and PS4 right and the jump was obvious....But the same console with higher specs (again the average user probably won't understand the difference between 6 and 8 cores or a new GPU architecture) might have a hard time proving it's worth another 400 buck investment. Side by side with the PS4 the reaction might be: it's as heavy, as loud, same looking (or similiar) the OS looks the same, runs the same only difference is higher res in games or 60 FPS. Two aspects people outside of the hardcore community barely understand the meaning of or don't care, especially when the experience ends up being almost the same (or atleast that's the impression i get when people stand in front of 4K Telis and can't tell the difference).
At least on the n64 there were games that legitimately stated: you need the memory expansion to run this game.
Here's another example... did games need the XBox Elite? It was an upgrade in drive space, to fit gamer needs.
That said the biggest VR successes are probably going to be the most stylized ones (= Minecraft-like experiences) which is something that the current systems can deliver just fine even without any hardware upgrade. The irony ...
And yes, the other part is what @pior mentioned. They probably want the PS4.5 for a better VR experience. The framerate is a much bigger deal.
Honestly, I don't see why people are so negative about it. It's exactly what I've been disliking gamers lately. No matter what news comes out, what games are released, or (now) what hardware hits the market... everyone has to bitch, and tear it down. No one is required to buy this system, and it's not making the PS4 obsolete.