if the future of this industry is not consoles, can someone tell me what it is?

[arvfab]

手機扭蛋遊戲 !

 

[xollowsob]

Fake news. Consoles market, PC gaming, mobile gaming and the total gaming as a whole have been growing in the two most recent generations as can be seen above.

Funky numbers designed to piss on people's back and convince them it's raining.

How can the console space be growing if one of the big three has sold 1/2 of what they did last gen and 1/4 of that they did in the 360 gen?

Sony is making more revenue and profit now than in the PS2 generation. They are selling more games, some of them digital that give them best ROI, and on top of that they have the addons and game subs. And well, SIE now also gets money from other gaming platforms plus the movie/tv show adaptations.

Game subs have declined since PS4. Console sales are tracking behind PS4 and they can't be selling more games while launching fewer games.

It has been proven to be a total failure. The idea would have been good if the weaker one would have been a portable with tv out like Switch or PSP.

No. Portable console sell in the space for handhelds (3ds, psp et Al) not in the console market. No console generation has ever been won by the most powerful console, only the cheapest.

The PS5 is great as it is. Most of the games we saw until now in PS5 are mostly PS4 games with a facelift that were started without knowing the PS5 specs and without having engines ready to take advantage of the hardware. AAA games take around 5-9 years to be made, meaning we're years away from seeing games that since the start had the PS5 devkit and a proper engine to take advantage of it.

You're saying the PS5 is good but it takes 5 years to take advantage of it? Buy a PS5 to enjoy games that launch on the PS6 that were made for the PS5? You don't see an issue with that?

 

[Yurinka]

How can the console space be growing if one of the big three has sold 1/2 of what they did last gen and 1/4 of that they did in the 360 gen?

Different reasons, but basically four:

• There are now a bit more players even if maybe in average bought more consoles than then
• On average users now spend more money, specially on PS, the best selling one
• Such ARPU went up because inflation grew more than the price increase of the games, and on top of that games now get more (and faster) discounted and price dropped than then
• Such ARPU went up because now things like DLC/GaaS are more common and accepted in console

Game subs have declined since PS4. Console sales are tracking behind PS4 and they can't be selling more games while launching fewer games.

They didn't decline this generation, they grew in game subs (specially in GP) and in revenue (specially in PS Plus).

No. Portable console sell in the space for handhelds (3ds, psp et Al) not in the console market. No console generation has ever been won by the most powerful console, only the cheapest.

I didn't say that being the most powerful makes a console win a generation. I think there's a combination of reasons. And in many generations the cheapest one isn't the winner. In the current one there are cheap chinese ones that I assume have low sales.

Regarding portable consoles, normally they are counted under consoles. In the past, some analyst like newzoo included them with smartphones and tablets as putting all the handheld/mobile/portable stuff together. Nowadays since some of them have Windows they put it under PC. In any case, I'd have a group for home consoles, a different one for desktop+laptop PCs, another for portable consoles (independently of their OS), another one for mobile (tablet+smartphone), another one for VR/MR/XR and another one for gamesubs+cloud.

You're saying the PS5 is good but it takes 5 years to take advantage of it? Buy a PS5 to enjoy games that launch on the PS6 that were made for the PS5? You don't see an issue with that?

In the past AAA games needed 2-3 years to be made and changes in possibilities of the hardware were minor, so in 4th or 5th year devs started to show games that took advantage of the hardware.

Nowadays games take 5-9 years to be made, there has been a global pandemic causing delays, and in development introducing SSD+compression+in case of PS5 big additional I/O improvements that allow the biggest paradigm shift in gamedev since the movement from 2D to 3D and require big changes in engines and the workflow/pipeline of the developers. On top of that, AI made a huge advancement that is helping to highly improve and accelerate and improve the work in certain areas, but at the cost of a very long learning and training process and time required to develop the related tools and skillset.

Meaning, we'll start seeing devs taking advantage of PS5 pretty close to PS6 and it's likely that even beyond because a lot of these things require a lot of time. Meaning, stuff introduced this generation and doable this generation probably won't be seen showing its full potential pretty likely until the end of the next one.

 

[ksdixon]

I believe/hope that we'll have console big brothers, and handheld little brother companion devices, foregoing the Slim models.

Continue gaming with buttons, and all game save/friends etc stuff included, natively. With a working web browser, voice chat/discord integration, one or two choice android apps inclusion (Messenger/Netflix/Disney+/Youtube) handhelds might even stand a chance at replacing people's phones as the carry-round device.

 

[Would_you_kindly]

Microsoft streaming sticks obvs