No, I say, are there really anyone worried about the postponement of the release of the new Xbox and PlayStation? I realized this by playing, not by reading the press releases, since in the lobbies, in matchmaking, in casual groups, I meet many players who still use PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (the previous generation), especially the younger ones.
I don’t know if they are the absolute majority of the public, I don’t have official numbers at hand, they are certainly the majority of those I meet, and I meet them often. So I went to check. I’ll be fifty-five years old, I’ll be starting to feel better, but something doesn’t add up to me, in many ways.
So: PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series Let’s consider today that times have become faster, and let’s assume there is a real need for a hardware update. Yet, if you try to make an honest list of truly “next-gen” games, those designed only for this generation and not adapted, remastered, patched or made compatible with the previous one, the number remains surprisingly low. Next gen should be this: games that are impossible to run on old machines. Well, after six years there are few, very few.
Even current-gen only titles, those that do not run on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, such as ARC Raiders, remain the result of a prudent logic. They are modern games, technically solid, but where the idea counts, and they don’t really break with the previous generation, they surpass it in a polite way. It is a next-gen by exclusion, not by conception (let’s say that ARC Raiders could very well be adapted to previous generations, and given their success it doesn’t mean they won’t).
The reason is not difficult to identify and there is nothing romantic about it. Developing video games today costs too much, takes a very long time and involves enormous economic risks, and software houses try to sell on as many platforms as possible, so cross-gen becomes a form of insurance, not a creative choice. Microsoft has declared it openly, Sony has launched some announcements that ended up in nothing, it has done its calculations. Because the clear generational leap, the one that once justified the purchase of a new console, is made by the software houses, not by those who produce the hardware. You buy a new console to play that game (by the way: it’s possible that the constant delays of GTA 6 are also linked to this, they don’t know what to optimize the game for, for which console, and for GTA 6 the hardware of the current consoles are already old).
So talking about PlayStation 6 or a new Xbox already makes chickens laugh (why do they say that? I guess because chickens never laugh, but we laugh too much and then feel bad about it). The rumors circulating do not speak of official announcements, they are rumors linked to real supply problems, in particular to the scarcity and growing costs of GPUs and RAM, also due to competition with data centers for artificial intelligence, and of course, there is, the economic race is all there (and if something goes wrong, if it is a bubble, there will be a new global economic crisis, we missed it). Consequently there is talk of possible slippages beyond the 2027-2028 window, some are risking 2030.
The paradox is that, while the next generation is being discussed, many players are going backwards. Fallout 4, a 2015 game, saw a sharp increase in active players; Cyberpunk 2077 is rediscovered and replayed years after its release, now that it is finally complete (a masterpiece, when it came out it was full of bugs). On the other hand, when there is a lack of real innovation, the public doesn’t stop playing, they play better, they return to worlds that they know and that work, and Activision knows this well, which this year, living off Call of Duty and always selling the same game every year for 80 euros and always recycling the same maps and managing to make it worse every time, has taken a beating this year that will be remembered for at least another three generations.
Be that as it may: GPU and RAM are in short supply? But thank goodness.
If the new consoles were already ready, we probably wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway, and given how this generation has gone, with few really interesting games and a long series of compromises and remakes, the problem is not technological, it’s creative (and creative developers continue to fire them in blocks, welcome AI, best wishes). It’s almost worth getting an old gen, at least we know what to expect. It’s not nostalgia, or maybe it is, for when games were good.
