LLast week, my favorite gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation president Sean Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video game industry. His answer is It wasn’t what I expected.
“We’ve been doing these things this way for 30 years, and with each generation the costs have gone up and we’ve readjusted accordingly. We’ve now reached a precipice, where the center “We can’t continue to do what we’ve been doing… It’s time for a really hard reset on our business model, on what video games are,” he said. “We’re currently at a stage in hardware development that I call ‘only a dog can hear the difference.’ We’re fighting over teraflops, and that’s not the place to be. We need to compete with content. I think jacking up the specs on the box hit the limit. ”
This surprised me, so Apparently It’s very obvious, but gaming industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancements to drum up investment and hype, still aren’t saying much about this. If we were to honestly admit that we’re doing as much as we can wisely do with the power of consoles right now, that would mean a major, major shift in the way the gaming industry does business.
Also, I don’t care about technical specs at all, so I found Layden’s statement to be very valid. I was the least technically aware games journalist I knew, and I often felt like I was in the minority. It’s difficult to reliably tell the difference between 50fps and 60fps, or 4k and 8k resolution, or explain what ray tracing actually is. For me, the game started looking really great about 15 years ago, and most of the improvements I’ve seen since then have felt incremental. During that time, developers have been constantly innovating, but most of that innovation has been around themes and content rather than technological advancements.
Horizon Forbidden West: Essentially amazing graphics? Photo: Guerrilla/Sony
Source: www.theguardian.com
