They do because developing for two consoles is more time consuming and costly than developing for one.
Sony PS6, Microsoft neXt Series - 10th gen console speculation [2020]
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
- Start date
arandomguy
Veteran
There's more indicators that everyone is looking to push game prices up. As such it's certainly likely any next gen transition will universally standardize higher prices across the platform.
I think you are over estimating the zen 2 in the ps5 pro. Every gen of zen has had a 5-20% performance increase on the previous gen. Zen 6 is going to move to 12 core ccd vs 8 core on previous ones. So in a ps6 you are likely to see a 12 core zen 6.
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raytracingfan
Newcomer
That doesn't mean PS6 games have to be more expensive. They can just make cross-gen games $80 on both PS5 and PS6.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Not by much if all you do is make a PS5 version with a few bells and whistles for the PS6 version. That's what they been doing this gen.
There is no way that Sony or any other company is going to push exclusivity for more than a couple games next gen. After what happened with covid and now with tariffs, they will diversify their offer at various price points, instead of pushing just one console.
Sony has made multiple games that only run on PS5, likely because creating a PS4 version would be too much work/would require the game to be less ambitious.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
CPU should be tiled out to chiplet just like most things Zen 6. Main selling point will likely be the mobile one.
The home version will likely claim to be able to play GTAVI at 120hz by just playing it at 60fps then combining predictive framegen to get to 120, not sure how many people will care about that though. Maybe "3D!" will make a comback by then or 2028 and they'll be able to sell it that way. There are interestingly cheap ways to make "lightfields" (holograms) now in experimental papers. Conceivably Sony could show off a holographic TV coming out late 2027 or etc. and make that a big selling point. GTAVI in what is essentially hologram could generate a lot of headlines at the very least.
Which games are these, or rather what proportion, and when did that start?
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Not many though.
This isn't really the point though. Sony isn't altruistically trying to move gaming forward with new hardware. The reason to bring out hardware is keep people buying games. They learned this gen that a heavy cross gen period works well for them. They'll do the same again. The cost of this cross gen strategy is dwarfed by the revenue from having the games purchasable by more players. Especially since whenever they bring out new hardware they can't make it fast enough to satisfy the demand. Cross gen is a necessity really, despite Jim Ryan's "we believe in distinct generations" protestations to the contrary.
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Astro's Playroom and Ratchet and Clank come to mind from early in the generation. These titles are outliers though, because they had a specific goal of showcasing the new hardware and really selling what the PS5 is about to early adopters and core gamers. Titles that didn't have this goal were multiplatform for a good few years.
And this was a sensible and successful approach for Sony to take. A lot of early talk was about how Series S / X couldn't handle R&C because of it's SSD, which was later shown to be untrue, but by then the narrative surrounding the hardware was established. Same with raytracing, where Sony had both R&C and a massively pimped up version of Spiderman.
One of the ways that MS absolutely played themselves this gen was in not producing any early software, at all, that attempted to showcase the real next gen capabilities of particularly the Series X. An unforced schoolboy error from a console division that specialises in unforced schoolboy errors.
On that note, I think there's a real chance that for next gen MS will attempt to clumsily unify Xbox and PC gaming. I'm a bit concerned that MS will forgo their current console specific approach where the game, driver and OS are all baked together to form a very efficient and very stable distributable, and move to the wild west (and frequent stutterfest) of Windows gaming. I personally love PC gaming and don't have a current gen console, but I'll happily admit that the experience on console is definitely more consistent and stable. It would not surprise me to see MS move to a Windows style approach where hardware is both more expensive and less well utilised, and where even more consumers abandon MS's hardware as a consequence. And then MS will be surprised that they're struggling to grow Gamepass subscriptions.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It could happen, but I think the idea is to make a streamlined Windows, not go the other way and make a bloated Xbox.
The fact is that the unification of consoles with the PC is inevitable, and we see that this will not only affect MS in the long run. Now you can say that Microsoft is doing this because it has no other choice, but it is not that simple. The answer is right there in front of everyone's eyes, you just have to read the statistical analyses of recent years. The user base of consoles is decreasing. Yes, even the PS camp, just look at the latest quarterly report to see how many fewer consoles they were able to sell. I know there is a lot of hype and change at Nintendo, which is why everyone is optimistic about the success of the Switch2, but looking at the formation of the market, it is not at all certain that it will be as successful in the long run as its predecessor. Meanwhile, PC gaming is growing, and this is especially true for the PC Game Pass. The prices is reaching a level where people will buy fewer and fewer full-priced games, so the future looks to be the subscription model.
They could have flooded the market with a $200 SS and a $350 SX console. They could have made this kind of price cut and the market would probably have responded well, especially if they had left most of their games exclusive to these consoles. They could have done it because they have the money to finance all of it. But, to what extent would that have been a success? They could have sold twice as many Xbox consoles, but at the same time they would have locked themselves into the globally stagnant console ecosystem. Sony and Nintendo are in exactly this shoes and it is possible that they will soon feel the negative effects of this closed ecosystem. MS is opening up to a larger, constantly evolving market, and the popular and ubiquitous Windows PCs are the key to this. You have to see, even with a console head, that this is the direction of gaming. Of course, there are many question marks at the moment, to which we will have to get answers over time, how, with what console-like PC hardware and with what modern PC-Xbox UI they will implement all this.
The Switch has passed over 150 million units despite not seeing cost reduction on the level of the PS2, and the PS5 while declining in sales is generating very significant amounts of revenue. It's only Xbox console sales that have cratered. The lack of cost reduction across the lifetime of the current gen is a significant factor is reduced demand. Nintendo mitigated this by going with withered tech as always, MS tried to mitigate this by creating the Series S but they botched this in classic MS fashion by penny pinching over 2GB of memory and deliberately making no killer apps for the Series consoles.
But this conversation is now straying away from the topic of the thread we're in, so I'll bring it back by saying that Nintendo's approach by using older tech on a cheaper node was right for them with the Switch and it is right for the Swtich 2, and that MS's idea of a cheaper console with made leading edge tech but targetting a lower performance profile would also be sound but they need to not trash it with damagingly low ram amounts and no software to show that yes, even though it's lower end hardware it is still an advancement over last gen and valid platform for the upcoming generation.
The 'unification' of console and PC is not needed, certainly not on the level of ditching console style highly efficient builds with game / driver ver. / OS ver. all separate. 95+% of the development can be shared while still providing for tens of millions of hardware units that offer a more controlled but more efficient and stable approaching to providing gaming entertainment. Same engines, same tools, same assets, and many of the same architectural optimisations.
Eliminating console builds for Xbox consoles is not an advantage. MS will be making console builds for PS6 and Switch 2, both of which will be vastly more different to making a game for Xbox consoles anyway.
I don't advocate for massively loss leading on consoles or MS throwing infinite money at trying to gain market share. MS can target a growing PC base while regaining some of their recklessly lost console base for a minimal amount of additional work. The key difference between Xbox and Windows is the driver and OS model, where Xbox consoles are actually easier to work with than Windows. This is a known quantity that developers are extremely familiar with, and which accounts for a small amount of development resource for a cross platform product.
The people that design Xbox hardware are exceptional. OTOH the people that determine Xbox hardware goals, and that manage the co-ordination of hardware sales and software strategy, are utterly incompetent and have been since about 2010.
This is not a consistent comparison. According to financial reports, Xbox also generates significant revenue, even more with fewer consoles sold than PS does with more consoles sold, so MS can at least show good results from a business perspective. And this is not because of the multi-platform strategy, because so far they have only had a small amount of revenue from it compared to the constantly increasing Game Pass revenue.
Ratchet and Clank was PS5 exclusive and came out very early on. TLOU Part One (despite being a remake in the TLOU Part Two engine) was also PS5 exclusive.
What evidence do we have that they are going this way? Xbox has always been the more bloated of the two consoles since it’s running windows, I can’t see MS suddenly shifting course and streamlining windows for PCs when they didn’t bother for their consoles for twenty years.
I don't believe that MS generate more revenue from ~30 million Series consoles than Sony do from ~80~90 million PS5s.
The 360 had less memory allocated to system reservations than the PS3. It reduced over time for PS3 but 360 was always more efficient at a system level. The 360 never had a whole core reserved for the OS, while the PS3 had a whole SPU and some core CPU reserved.
Xbox One and then the Series consoles had about the same or perhaps slightly less memory reserved than their Playstation counterparts.
Despite the commonly held opinion online, Windows is not inherently massively bloated. Most of the bloat in practice comes from MS's decision to run all kinds of stuff that serves them rather than their customers, and to prioritise their management level business cases rather than their customer's immediate needs.
Pray tell why then do games frequently run better and at higher resolutions on PS5 compared to Series X?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'inherently', obviously there is no divine commandment that says Windows must always be bloated. As you say, it's bloated due to junk MS throws in there for their own purposes.
