The Big Story
I will spare you any election takes this weekend as I’m sure we’re all exhausted from the week, instead I will talk about something I spent the week doing.
There wasn’t an awful lot of non-election news this week, but Thursday and Friday did hold the review embargoes for the new Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles. My colleague Devin Coldewey spent some time with the new device from PlayStation from his place in Seattle while I fired up the Series X and Series S in my San Francisco apartment. It was welcome respite from the 24-hour news cycle, though I was a bit disappointed by the fact that there wasn’t a really fun launch title to occupy myself with.
You can read my full review of the Series X here, where I go into a good amount of detail about my likes and dislikes on the system.
What I want to talk about here is whether these systems actually mean much for the future of gaming.
It’s clear that over the past couple of years it’s been cross-platform titles designed for lowest common denominator systems that have taken over the world. Titles that are playable on mobile, tablet, console and PC have been shown to be the biggest opportunity for game publishers, so how much room is there for a console to make a substantial jump in processing power and it actually mean something?
I would imagine that the PS4 and Xbox One are both going to have long retirements ahead of them with game publishers building titles that are released for these systems or are at least playable through the respective subscription gaming services. And when a title is built with a lesser system in mind, can it even fully capitalize on the advantages of the newer system? It’s especially odd to witness while so many big companies are pushing cloud gaming as the future, a dream of hardware agnosticism that seems at direct odds with selling massive consoles that push limits.
I think that these are going to be some of the big questions we see play out as we enter a new console generation at a time where complex single-player titles are waning in popularity and multiplayer games that are simple at heart but complex to master become the standard pursuit. The next generation of consoles was already going to take plenty of time to come into its own, but I think there’s also the chance that these intersecting plays by companies like Microsoft end up reshaping the landscape in a way where not all of these pursuits can succeed.
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