I think I’ll be getting the regular version, with the disc drive. I’m sentimental I guess, I still like the idea of owning games.
But, honestly, I think it’s also a question of environmental impact. As consoles get more and more powerful, it’s probably a better idea to get rid of any and all physical games, so I guess I don’t really know yet.
I’m already all-in on the Xbox ecosystem that I’m sure I’ll be getting a Series X. So the PS5 will, like the PS4 before it, generally just be something I pick up to play exclusives, and I just don’t have a particular attachment to physical media, so assuming it’s cheaper, I’ll go digital. Or otherwise wait for the slim version that inevitable gets released in another 2-3 years that isn’t an utter monstrosity.
I’m probably gonna get the disc drive one, because while I don’t really buy physical games anymore and most of the ones I own have I’ve gotten digitally via ps+ later, I still like the option, especially if they’re gonna do a disc verification thing for Ps3 games at some point.
RE: The design, I hope they have it in black, because the two-tone design probably highlights the weirdness of it. I’m as split on the design as the design itself.
I do want to hear more about how they’re gonna handle the backwards compatibility with Ps3 and 4, their coyness and silence around this issue makes me very worried it’s gonna be very disappointing.
I got the sense that they were doing software-based backward compatibility for a subset of PS4 games and that’s all they were promising for the moment.
My family and friends buy disks for single-player games and share them so we don’t have to pay £50 each for the same week-long experience. Even if the entire used-market disappeared because of the closing of retail stores, buying the Digital-Only console still feels like the most expensive option in the long run.
If I do get one, it will likely be the one with the disc drive. Im a weirdo who buys a lot of anime DVDs and Blu-Rays still and I want to have access to them, and its better to have options to get disc or digital. (plus I have parents who know I like games and will often ask me if theres any games I’m looking at around my birthday, having the option to get a disc helps with that as they’re not super tech-savvy lol)
Leaning towards disc drive for the sake of my PS4 game collection, but most of those are now dirt cheap digitally and I really don’t need multiple 4K BD players in my house. I’m conflicted, it’ll come down to the price on each.
It’s not just a case of tech-savviness; Sony still doesn’t allow digital games to be gifted to people. You can’t buy codes for games from their store, neither can you set-up a user-account and buy games to be sent directly to friends. You have to hope the game is available via digital code from some other online-store (i.e. Amazon is the only place I’ve seen do this sometimes) or you either have to buy Playstation cards (wasting money by only buying in multiples of 5) or use their account to buy something.
The console manufacturers in general offer a pretty awful service for buying digital games.
Is there really that much coyness or silence? They’ve stated officially that basically all PS4 games will be supported. I don’t know if they specifically said PS3 is NOT happening, but they certainly didn’t say it is happening, because it isn’t.
The only game sharing I do is between my wife and I, in which case, because of the way the Home console designation works, buying digital is actually preferable. We designate each other’s as our Home console, allowing us to both play at the same time on one digital purchase. It becomes a problem if the internet goes down, but even just tethering to our phones for a quick check-in is enough to keep everything running.
Having said that, I still make lots of use of Gamefly for games only one of us is interested in, or we’re unsure about, so we’ll probably end up going with the full versions.
PS4 is a lock since the install base on that system was so massive and it’d look really bad to not support that library, but PS3 I don’t see happening. Xbox pushed hard on BC since the 360 ownership was similarly huge, and it was a boutique feature their competitor didn’t have that could help win them some goodwill from fans back. Plus the Xbox original/360 architecture wasn’t tremendously hard to get running on modern hardware (360 dev kits were effortlessly easy to work with compared to PS3).
There’s several games from that generation I’d like to play again, and especially with the sorts of cool enhancement features Microsoft has been doing for older games, but the PS3 hardware is a technical nightmare and there aren’t that many people who are make or break for that feature.
I’m getting the disc sku because while I have decent internet now it may not always be the case and there also may be data caps. The added benefit is that most of my Playstation games are on disc so if there’s decent to good backwards compatibility I can just put them in. The added added benefit is that it’s an ultra 4k blu-ray drive and I have a couple of those I’d like to watch.
Wouldn’t it be a dream if their backwards compatibility solution was to let you download the disc PS4 games tied to your account? Like that’s somewhere in the finer workings, right? I already had to download however much of the game even with the disc, just give me a digital copy.
The funny thing is that this was basically Microsoft’s 2013 X1 pitch, but was walked back due to widespread backlash so they just left it so the disc remains the license check and you didn’t need to worry about internet connectivity.
The Xbox situation is also instructive in that while I do have a big library of 360 and OG Xbox discs, thanks to games with gold and gamepass, I pretty much have all those discs in digital form anyway. And any that fall through the cracks are on sale for $5 every few months. I imagine that is what’s going to happen to a lot of people’s PS4 libraries going into the next gen.
I feel like an old grump saying this, and I also recognize it’s as much a taste thing as anything, but on a personal level these last two console generations haven’t excited me at all. I don’t fully know how to explain it, and I’m sure a lot of it is nostalgia, but I felt the AAA titles around the launch of the X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 had an ambition that’s been completely lost in AAA development.
The series that were launched or in development at the time of the PS3 and X360 launch included Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space. It’s also around the time of TES IV: Oblivion - which isn’t as well regarded as Morrowind or Skyrim, but had some really interesting ideas I appreciated, such as its Radiant AI system. And, yes, most of those games fell short of their expectations, but there was at least an ambition and willingness to be more experimental there that I don’t feel has really been matched since - not just in gameplay, but also in themes and narratives. I have a hard time seeing a modern AAA studio being creative enough to conceive of a game where you travel through time through accessing “DNA memories”. Or even trying to consciously recreate a Space Opera that harks back to 70’s and 80’s sci-fi with it design (and musical) sensibilities.
I’m guessing the main reason for this is, of course, the quest for profits. It’s better to rehash something that sells well. But it’s sad to me because while there is a ton of great stuff happening in the Indie space, I’m always curious what the larger teams crammed with so much talent and good financial backing could do if they didn’t have to just churn out a ton of content and could work instead on making interesting concepts.
It’s kinda fucked up that it’s extremely likely that the reason I’ll be getting an Xbox Series X over a PS5 is because PS5 only has one of each type of USB port.
It would make the PS5 impossible to run a fighting game tournament on without the use of a secondary USB hub or a converter, which would no doubt add latency to the inputs. For a genre that measures things in frames instead of seconds, a single ms of latency is crucial.
Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see if the PS5 really doesn’t have a port on the back (no trustworthy outlets have had hands-on time with it that I know of so reports are conflicting and probably speculation/guesses) and how bad the baseline controller latency for both machines ends up being.
Maybe Sony or Microsoft will put out an honest-to-fucking-god wired controller this generation…
I fucking wish.
Long story short, It’s going to really fucking suck if an entire genre got fucked over because Sony wanted to cut the small cost of adding another USB.
I agree that games are becoming less exciting and I think you nailed the biggest reason on the head with games getting more risk averse, what with budgets ballooning, development time escalating, and new ways of sucking dollars out of wallets being found and perfected.
But two other reasons jump out during these years:
1) There just aren’t as many studios out there who can produce a “AAA” game anymore. I mean, more games are being made than ever, but since our expectations of “AAA” games have skyrocketed, so few of those games meet that definition. Is Life is Strange a “AAA” title? It would have been two generations ago. What about The Surge? Hell, even Days Gone had people questioning if it was a AAA game.
2) The short answer is: the era of the exclusive is over and that makes distinguishing consoles boring.
So many games get ported to every console, even becoming an expectation for most games to make their way to the most popular platforms like Steam and Switch (I mean, look at the abuse the Ooblets team got for being a timed Epic Game Store exclusive). Consoles are becoming less of a place to play x games, but a place to play x games y way*.
The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era was both the start of this and the last time each console had a unique identity. There was an unprecedented amount of games that launched on all three (or at least two) of those platforms, but each console had a decent library of exclusives to call their own and carve their own identity out of.
While PS3 and 360 had very different launches and libraries at the start of the console generation (do you remember the PS3 launching without a digital store?!), they were pretty much identical by the end of the cycle beyond their hardware quirks and first party support.
And even if the Xbox One did its best to make everyone hate it when it launched, the gap between it and the PS4 is so small that I just assume most games are on both platforms if they aren’t first party or have some sort of exclusivity window.
So now we have PS5 and Xbox Series X. Two consoles that are relying on certain advancements in technology, their own design philosophies of how a consoles should work, and a small handful of exclusives for the public to tell them apart. Hard to be excited for either one when, like I was talking about at the start of this post, the number of USB ports is most likely going to be determining which one I get.
*Nintendo obviously took this to an extreme, building platforms around tablets, 3D gimmicks, touch screens, and motion control, so much so that it isolated most games being made until the Switch came around.
At the price points some outlets are speculating, it’s hard to imagine why I would purchase either of them before buying a new graphics card for my PC (which, incidentally, has several USB ports).
Microsoft has made itself a hard sell, because all Xbox ‘exclusives’ are also released on PC around the same time; there are still several great Playstation games that are not on PC, and the ones that do come to PC often take much longer. (We’re five years out from Bloodborne and still don’t have a confirmation that it’s being ported, or when it would come out.) But I am pretty tired of spending my entire tax return on a console so I have the Privilege of spending more money to buy, like, four games.
Other problem: the Xbox historically has supported like 5% of the fighting games that get played at tournaments.
It’s going to suck for that scene if the PS5 doesn’t have more ports, for sure.
There are almost certainly going to be USB ports on the back of the PS5. It wouldn’t be able to support PSVR or external hard drives without them.
