Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?

[The-Nastiest]

This has been an economic reality since console generations became a thing, though. It wasn't ever a hinderance enough to stop development of next gen only titles, until maybe now. Honestly, I do believe that Microsoft coming into this gen with a "cross-gen ride or die" attitude was both seen as pro consumer enough to win some good will, and that the underlying technology of modern games is usually scalable enough to hit both targets with a playable experience.

To be honest, it isn't like sales of next gen only titles have really suffered, have they? Rift Apart moved a million copies in just over a month didn't it? A quality game will do that. There are also plenty of examples of quality software released on last generation hardware selling poorly. That's why games like Megaman 6 on NES and Shante on Gameboy Color cost so much now. Because nobody bought them back then. Shante is a prime example, because GBA would have played that via BC. I'm sure there are example of PS1 games or PS2 games that fit that bill as well. Rule of Rose comes to mind. There is a risk in not making your game for next gen as well.

While I agree that it's been an economic reality forever, the ballooning cost of game development has changed. The amount of copies to break even or make a profit is higher now than before and probably hasn't scaled linearly with how it was in the past.

Even in your example of Rift Apart we know it sold at least 1 million copies, but in a vacuum as a singular release by a sole developer, what was the break even sales number for a game that had such high production values? Well, we don't know that, but what we do know is that Insomniac can take that risk. Their business team can justify it since the single platform, next-gen only Ratchet was sandwiched in between a Miles Morales release on PS5 and PS4 and then Spider-Man Remastered PC and another Miles Morales release on PC (have we found out if PC players have to pay full price for MM even if they bought Spidey Remastered?).

So even if Ratchet missed goals, the very popular and well selling Spider-Man games were going to support any potential shortfall.

They were able to take that risk.

 

[dobwal]

Uncharted, Gears

While I agree that it's been an economic reality forever, the ballooning cost of game development has changed. The amount of copies to break even or make a profit is higher now than before and probably hasn't scaled linearly with how it was in the past.

Even in your example of Rift Apart we know it sold at least 1 million copies, but in a vacuum as a singular release by a sole developer, what was the break even sales number for a game that had such high production values? Well, we don't know that, but what we do know is that Insomniac can take that risk. Their business team can justify it since the single platform, next-gen only Ratchet was sandwiched in between a Miles Morales release on PS5 and PS4 and then Spider-Man Remastered PC and another Miles Morales release on PC (have we found out if PC players have to pay full price for MM even if they bought Spidey Remastered?).

So even if Ratchet missed goals, the very popular and well selling Spider-Man games were going to support any potential shortfall.

They were able to take that risk.

The investment of launch or first year titles for first party studios isn’t suppose to be a simple profit endeavor. Their main purpose is to drive platform sales and give next gen users motivation or justification for their purchases.

I understand software development costs have grown but so has the costs to users to fully participate in these platforms’ ecosystem. If we are going to pay $500+ for hardware/accessories, subscribe to multiplayer/other online services and buy $70 titles that allows billions more to be generated than past generations. Give us those one or two gen exclusive first/second party titles in that first year like Gears of War or Uncharted that will make us appreciate our purchase.

This is targeted especially for this gen where users are paying a premium far more than MSRP to obtain hardware. I doubt many did so for just more resolution and higher frame rates.

 

[The-Nastiest]

Uncharted, Gears

The investment of launch or first year titles for first party studios isn’t suppose to be a simple profit endeavor. Their main purpose is to drive platform sales and give next gen users motivation or justification for their purchases.

I understand software development costs have grown but so has the costs to users to fully participate in these platforms’ ecosystem. If we are going to pay $500+ for hardware/accessories, subscribe to multiplayer/other online services and buy $70 titles that allows billions more to be generated than past generations. Give us those one or two gen exclusive first/second party titles in that first year like Gears of War or Uncharted that will make us appreciate our purchase.

This is targeted especially for this gen where users are paying a premium far more than MSRP to obtain hardware. I doubt many did so for just more resolution and higher frame rates.

I think this line of thinking is a bit naive. Assessing risk and budgets are a major factor when looking at AAA title releases. Also, bringing up games like Uncharted and Gears from a couple of gens ago shows how much has changed since then.

When certain lines of business within big corps are past growth stage, their main goal is to generate profit. If it was about exclusive experiences to drive platform sales we would have seen more 1P current gen exclusives than what we have so far.

I think your line of thinking would hold more weight if at least 1 of the following titles were next gen exclusive. (Horizon:FW, Forza Horizon 5, Halo 5, GT7, God of War:R)

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Mid gen updates became more significant this last console cycle. Will the same happen this generation, is it needed or wanted? What would they be called anyway, the "Xbox Series XX" does not have a ring to it.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

With the very, very slow update to "new gen consoles only" and no immediately obvious upgrades to current gen consoles thanks to Moore's law and graphics getting "good enough" for most games that will come out... Well I suspect this console cycle could be pretty long. 8 years would be the standard, longer is entirely possible.

But! We know RDNA4 should launch in 2024 and have some dedicated, probably xilinx designed, AI inference acceleration. AI upscaling and cleanup is headline grabbing, better(ish, kinda) upscaling is cool. But more relevantly AI RT denoising and frame insertion (virtual framerate doubling) are neat applications that grab headlines better. No real improvement in Moore's law means appreciably bigger console chips aren't the obvious choice. But higher GPU and memory clockspeeds definitely are, combined with "FSR3" or whatever inserted here, a PS5 Pro with much better RT and "doubling" every (enough?) games framerates would sound appealing enough to buy.

Then there's also the apparently vastly upgraded hw encoders. Vastly better video out from consoles would be a big draw to some people, record/stream at high quality HDR 4k60(or 120 even?) for twitch or youtube or even remote play sounds money worthy. Throw in a 1tb ssd, Wifi-6/7, stuff like that a mid gen upgrade could sound as appealing as last cycle.

The obvious upgrade for Series S is to make a mobile version, but it's not clear when AMD could manage to squeeze that package down to say, 10w or less. Seems doable eventually though.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The fact that cross gen has lasted so long and will now be a thing going forward has changed things.
So I think we've already moved into a rolling gen situation. More so out of circumstances than it being planned.

It's possible that it wasn't the plan for Sony, although I suspect like MS, they were already laying the groundwork for rolling generations as a potential way forward as early as the PS4-P. Granted they may not have committed to it as early as MS has.

Good BC support can be seen as a necessary pre-requisite for supporting rolling generations as you want the transition between generations to be as easy and seemless as possible for both the users of the console as well as the developers making games for the console. As such, how seriously BC is supported can be seen as an early indication for rolling generations being a potential goal.

While PS2 and PS3 had BC, you can easily see that there was little incentive to keep it going outside of early marketing for the consoles and as a result it's initial implementation was costly (due to being meant only for launch marketing purposes) and dropped quickly. That's not the case with PS5, where BC support is relatively robust, taken seriously and an integral design of the console. IE - it's not something that is easily removed and dropped once it no longer serves a viable marketing purpose.

Scalability in games is another pre-requisite for rolling generations and even Sony got some experience with that on the PS4-P. MS started a bit earlier with their internal studios working on PC versions of their engines with high scalability in mind.

Regards,
SB

 

[Sonic]

This was kind of predicted at the onset of last generation. With the change over to x86 it only makes sense to take advantage of the transitional time period. Yeah it kinda sucks we need to wait for current gen systems to really show their wings but if it means I continue getting 60 fps options while last gen remains at 30 fps I'll take it as a blessing for a while.

It also makes sense from a total sales perspective. Demand for current gen systems is high enough that it's better to develop for cross gen until the market has reached the point where current gen can sustain the industry. When we reach that tipping point then we'll finally see what these consoles are capable of. Until then though devs and oibs might as well take advantage of the wider market as a whole.


1st parties this gen has been of interest. It's telling the PC market is getting more attention from Sony as time goes on. Content is king.

 

[Janne Kylliö]

I sure hope there will be mid gen refresh or early next gen introduction.

Current bunch of consoles are a bit of a letdown to be honest, primarily because of the poor RT performance and no real AI based upscaling. CPU performance seems to be OK, but compared to last three Nvidia GPU architectures the console GPU's seem archaic and low in performance.

I want to play games that look like that Nvidia rtx racer demo!

Well, back to PC gaming I guess? Just need to upgrade to the Raptor Lake and the RTX 40 series when those are released.

 

[PSman1700]

I sure hope there will be mid gen refresh or early next gen introduction.

Current bunch of consoles are a bit of a letdown to be honest, primarily because of the poor RT performance and no real AI based upscaling. CPU performance seems to be OK, but compared to last three Nvidia GPU architectures the console GPU's seem archaic and low in performance.

I want to play games that look like that Nvidia rtx racer demo!

Well, back to PC gaming I guess? Just need to upgrade to the Raptor Lake and the RTX 40 series when those are released.

It isnt just RT and AI that is the 'problem' though. Normal raster/compute power has seen the smallest increase gen on gen yet, same for memory speed and amount. The CPU saw a good increase but thats mostly because last gen was extremely underpowered, a lower clocked Zen2 is indeed OK, however that launched 2019 in the form of 3700x.
Zen3 had some great efficiency improvements (IPC) and higher clocks, they missed the boat just by a hair there it seems.

Anyway yea, Sony games come to PC anyway so that can be enjoyed too.

 

[function]

I don't know how accurate their findings are, but this site seems confident that there's already a shrink of the PS5 down to 6nm:

PS5 Refresh: Oberon Plus

6nm EUV Shrink

www.angstronomics.com

This seems pretty reasonable, but the kind of shrink they're talking about wouldn't leave a lot of headroom for a PS5 Pro model without ending up with a huge chip. If Nvidia are to be believed then 5nm is an expensive way to get extra transistors, and I'm not sure how big the market would be for a Super Super Premium console with the memory bandwidth to match.

A more interesting area of speculation for me is what MS could do with shrink due to the Series X's particularities.

Assuming MS wanted to spend on a bit of additional engineering, they might be able to shrink the chip beyond just what the node gives them. For a start, GDDR6 (non-X) 18 mhz is increasingly appearing on AMD cards, and 18 mhz would give you 29% more bandwidth per chip, possibly allowing MS to ditch 64-bits of their chonky memory bus and the associated PHYs and gubbins, saving a good chunk of the die area that doesn't scale well with smaller nodes. So more chips per wafer. That would also mean a less complex mobo with fewer traces, and fewer physical memory chips which saves money further. You would lose 20% of your L2 cache, but if that's a problem a larger L2 may compensate for while still being an overall die saving over the current effort.

Plus grab a few extra mhz for the GPU if it fits in with power reduction goals, of course.

Is this practical and would it be cost effective? No idea. With the X1S, MS grabbed some mhz for the GPU and esram though.

 

[PSman1700]

This seems pretty reasonable, but the kind of shrink they're talking about wouldn't leave a lot of headroom for a PS5 Pro model without ending up with a huge chip. If Nvidia are to be believed then 5nm is an expensive way to get extra transistors, and I'm not sure how big the market would be for a Super Super Premium console with the memory bandwidth to match.

Unless consoles are going to be 1000+ dollar machines. It might happen if a next generation comes along. Otherwise increases are going to be even smaller than this time around.

 

[eastmen]

I sure hope there will be mid gen refresh or early next gen introduction.

Current bunch of consoles are a bit of a letdown to be honest, primarily because of the poor RT performance and no real AI based upscaling. CPU performance seems to be OK, but compared to last three Nvidia GPU architectures the console GPU's seem archaic and low in performance.

I want to play games that look like that Nvidia rtx racer demo!

Well, back to PC gaming I guess? Just need to upgrade to the Raptor Lake and the RTX 40 series when those are released.

We have to see what AMD is able to bring to the table. For this generation I doubt MS or sony will move off AMD. So a refresh could be a zen 4 + rdna 3. maybe a refresh of zen 5+ rdna 4 in 2025 ?

 

[dobwal]

I think this line of thinking is a bit naive. Assessing risk and budgets are a major factor when looking at AAA title releases. Also, bringing up games like Uncharted and Gears from a couple of gens ago shows how much has changed since then.

When certain lines of business within big corps are past growth stage, their main goal is to generate profit. If it was about exclusive experiences to drive platform sales we would have seen more 1P current gen exclusives than what we have so far.

I think your line of thinking would hold more weight if at least 1 of the following titles were next gen exclusive. (Horizon:FW, Forza Horizon 5, Halo 5, GT7, God of War:R)

I don't think it's naive at all. Every new generation represents an opportunity to grow your platform as well as an opportunity to lose users. Profit generation doesn't happen without early adopters. So MS and Sony should be motivated to grab as many buyers as early as possible and reward those early adopters.

Gears and Uncharted should be easier to pull off today in terms of profit generation. MS and Sony were required to manufacture Gears and Uncharted optical discs to maintain an ample supply over a long period of time to maximize sales. Yet, games no longer require that level of servicing anymore.

Not only does digital distribution allow games to have far longer legs than they use to have. Subscription services like Game Pass have added to the potential value of software. So games launched early in the gen don't have to simply fade away as they once did.

Hardware sales have grown, and so have software, accessories, and subscription fees. You are not going to convince me that in reality it is also required that the usual 1st year one or two marque-exclusive first-party AAA titles have to show up later now.

 

[davis.anthony]

Current bunch of consoles are a bit of a let down to be honest, primarily because of the poor RT performance

I think the industry needs to be thankful the consoles even have RT as if they didn't the adoption rate of RT in games would have been extremely slow for the next 5-6 years.

There's at least enough RT hardware in the consoles for developers to start changing their engines and pipe lines ready for next gen.

 

[PSman1700]

I think the industry needs to be thankful the consoles even have RT as if they didn't the adoption rate of RT in games would have been extremely slow for the next 5-6 years.

There's at least enough RT hardware in the consoles for developers to start changing their engines and pipe lines ready for next gen.

RT in games was ramping up quite fast during 2018, 2019 and 2020, before the consoles launched. Its a start, however a very meager one as the RT is very, very limited. UE5 also doesnt seem to go for HW-RT either.

 

[Playsaves3]

With the very, very slow update to "new gen consoles only" and no immediately obvious upgrades to current gen consoles thanks to Moore's law and graphics getting "good enough" for most games that will come out... Well I suspect this console cycle could be pretty long. 8 years would be the standard, longer is entirely possible.

But! We know RDNA4 should launch in 2024 and have some dedicated, probably xilinx designed, AI inference acceleration. AI upscaling and cleanup is headline grabbing, better(ish, kinda) upscaling is cool. But more relevantly AI RT denoising and frame insertion (virtual framerate doubling) are neat applications that grab headlines better. No real improvement in Moore's law means appreciably bigger console chips aren't the obvious choice. But higher GPU and memory clockspeeds definitely are, combined with "FSR3" or whatever inserted here, a PS5 Pro with much better RT and "doubling" every (enough?) games framerates would sound appealing enough to buy.

Then there's also the apparently vastly upgraded hw encoders. Vastly better video out from consoles would be a big draw to some people, record/stream at high quality HDR 4k60(or 120 even?) for twitch or youtube or even remote play sounds money worthy. Throw in a 1tb ssd, Wifi-6/7, stuff like that a mid gen upgrade could sound as appealing as last cycle.

The obvious upgrade for Series S is to make a mobile version, but it's not clear when AMD could manage to squeeze that package down to say, 10w or less. Seems doable eventually though.

I want a pro so we can get a better cpu won’t zen 5 release in 2024? They can use a variation of that

 

[vjPiedPiper]

Now here's a thought...

I think instead of mis gen-refreshes, we get shorter console generations.
With a rolling software support across gens, much more like the iphone model.

So next Xbox s, and next Xbox X, in 2025, full back compat with Series consoles,
and no Next exclusive titles for first 1-2 years?

I can't see a mid-gen refresh, but I COULD see something like that happening.

 

[davis.anthony]

The problem with a next gen refresh isn't a hardware problem, it's a software one.

They have to give gamers a reason to upgrade and once again spend hundreds of dollars, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X were easy sells as they simply looked better on a 4k TV.

But a new mid-gen refresh will still be upscaling to 4k and won't really look that much different to the average consumer then what PS5 and Xbox Series-X currently looks like on their TV.

60fps would be nice but is it worth spending hundreds to get? Maybe, maybe not, but it may be a hard sell across the board.

So then you have graphics, improved RT is the obvious one but that will completely depend on where the industry is, if games are exclusively RT and really pushing it then a next gen refresh could offer a good and visible upgrade.

But if it's still merely a tick box add on for most games it'll be a tough sell.

 

[PSman1700]

The problem with a next gen refresh isn't a hardware problem

Thats not what MS stated though.

 

[Below2D]

RT in games was ramping up quite fast during 2018, 2019 and 2020, before the consoles launched. Its a start, however a very meager one as the RT is very, very limited. UE5 also doesnt seem to go for HW-RT either.

Yeah, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Games supporting RT were seeing a faster adoption rate way before the release of the current gen consoles.

They’re even adding RT retroactively to some games all the while ignoring the console version and there are other more recent games that don’t even support it on consoles but do on PC.