XSX vs PS5

[Nintex]

lmao 

Aonuma: --I think that the hurdle that was raised with "Breath of the Wild" has now been surpassed again with "Tears of the Kingdom," and players' expectations have been raised even higher that the company will make something even more amazing, but……

Aonuma: Fujibayashi and the rest of the development team do not consider this a hurdle, so please keep your expectations high!

[Nintex]

[Nintex]

EA put all their resources into new Battlefield which  now enters development hell 

[Nintex]

Your $500 game boxes and $80 games cannot handle leap years 

[Nintex]

hard to keep up with all this

[chronovore]

Still haven't seen an adequate explanation of why restructures/layoffs are all happening at once. The Embracer problems are clearly a matter of them planning on financing that wasn't already in-hand, and ultimately fell through at the worst possible time. 

Microsoft/Blizzard-Activision-King, Sony, EA, Riot, etc. are in a full-blown panic and laying off swathes of people, while still reporting sizable profits. 

It's just ridiculous. The language is "It's unavoidable," but this is not a move made because they're dying, it's a move toward increased profits without understanding the difficulty of building a successful team.

[chronovore]

Harada calling out the talentless hacks 

Harada needs to get a fucking grip, and understand how to steer a ship as opposed to a dinghy. PS2 teams were nimble in ways that cannot happen on anything AAA. 

I wish him luck.

[Potato]

Still haven't seen an adequate explanation of why restructures/layoffs are all happening at once. The Embracer problems are clearly a matter of them planning on financing that wasn't already in-hand, and ultimately fell through at the worst possible time. 

Microsoft/Blizzard-Activision-King, Sony, EA, Riot, etc. are in a full-blown panic and laying off swathes of people, while still reporting sizable profits. 

It's just ridiculous. The language is "It's unavoidable," but this is not a move made because they're dying, it's a move toward increased profits without understanding the difficulty of building a successful team.

It's not just happening in the video game space. A bunch of industries are laying people off.

[chronovore]

Shit, I'm likely pretty myopic on that front. So is this the beginning of the soft apocalypse, or do we jump directly into solarpunk futures where we're eating ferns and hand-cranking batteries as a side gig?

[Nintex]

Still haven't seen an adequate explanation of why restructures/layoffs are all happening at once. The Embracer problems are clearly a matter of them planning on financing that wasn't already in-hand, and ultimately fell through at the worst possible time. 
Microsoft/Blizzard-Activision-King, Sony, EA, Riot, etc. are in a full-blown panic and laying off swathes of people, while still reporting sizable profits. 
It's just ridiculous. The language is "It's unavoidable," but this is not a move made because they're dying, it's a move toward increased profits without understanding the difficulty of building a successful team.

Because there is a big disconnect between what happens at the top and in the studios as the industry and the corporations grow bigger.
They don't believe making better games will turn their fortunes around, Phil Spencer said so himself. 

The return of investment and growth just wasn't there over the past 2 years so they adjust accordingly as they prepare for the next generation of games.

This is what a mature industry looks like, rows on spreadsheets, stories on Jira boards, miles of red tape and more time wasted on meetings than anything else. And that type of company also attracts a certain type of employee and won't hire the most creative or capable ones for one reason or another. So there are very few Ken Levines, John Carmacks or Cliffy B's waiting in the wings of these companies. They're mostly operating on the fumes of prior success. 

I recall reading in a book or an interview that Miyamoto told Iwata that if the same high standards of 'today' had applied to them, they would've never gotten hired.
Which shifted Iwata's thinking on what he once called 'garage developers devaluing the industry' and opened Nintendo up to indie developers.

Some other developers got 'lucky'. Capcom lost their top tier talent to other companies and Inafunes insanity of outsourcing everything to the west. Which brought them in a tough spot for a while but also meant that they had to hire a lot of new people who came up with fresh new ideas and who were really motivated to turn the ship around.

[Nintex]

The funny thing is, with Microsoft giving up this cycles console race for a cloud push, their cloud fucking sucks too and I'm not the only one that notices it now.

And the true believers try to explain that away like Spencer. 

[chronovore]

Still haven't seen an adequate explanation of why restructures/layoffs are all happening at once. The Embracer problems are clearly a matter of them planning on financing that wasn't already in-hand, and ultimately fell through at the worst possible time. 
Microsoft/Blizzard-Activision-King, Sony, EA, Riot, etc. are in a full-blown panic and laying off swathes of people, while still reporting sizable profits. 
It's just ridiculous. The language is "It's unavoidable," but this is not a move made because they're dying, it's a move toward increased profits without understanding the difficulty of building a successful team.

Because there is a big disconnect between what happens at the top and in the studios as the industry and the corporations grow bigger.
They don't believe making better games will turn their fortunes around, Phil Spencer said so himself. 

The return of investment and growth just wasn't there over the past 2 years so they adjust accordingly as they prepare for the next generation of games.

This is what a mature industry looks like, rows on spreadsheets, stories on Jira boards, miles of red tape and more time wasted on meetings than anything else. And that type of company also attracts a certain type of employee and won't hire the most creative or capable ones for one reason or another. So there are very few Ken Levines, John Carmacks or Cliffy B's waiting in the wings of these companies. They're mostly operating on the fumes of prior success. 

I recall reading in a book or an interview that Miyamoto told Iwata that if the same high standards of 'today' had applied to them, they would've never gotten hired.
Which shifted Iwata's thinking on what he once called 'garage developers devaluing the industry' and opened Nintendo up to indie developers.

Some other developers got 'lucky'. Capcom lost their top tier talent to other companies and Inafunes insanity of outsourcing everything to the west. Which brought them in a tough spot for a while but also meant that they had to hire a lot of new people who came up with fresh new ideas and who were really motivated to turn the ship around.

If you are thinking about the exodus of talent that happened after the Capcom Five bet was lost, it wasn't so much that other companies nabbed them, but that Capcom management treated those creators like they were personally responsible for third-party games not selling well on Nintendo hardware. So the creators left and made their own companies. Sadly, it looks like they brought most of Capcom's culture with them when they did. 

Anyway, you are right about the size of the company itself being a factor. The larger the bet, the more a sure thing is required. Fewer chances will be tolerated. Which is why it's weird to me that -- aside from MS, Sony, and Nintendo making their own "support the indies" efforts -- EA, UBI, and other larger publishers don't seem to want to take a few longshot bets themselves.

[Nintex]

Had a chat with my brother yesterday and he said that different investors back different projects based on budgets. Some studios turn $30 million projects into $100 million projects simply to attract investors looking for $100 million projects.

Same with tax breaks and subsidies and all that. There is just a lot incentives to hire more people and balloon the budgets.

[Potato]

Shit, I'm likely pretty myopic on that front. So is this the beginning of the soft apocalypse, or do we jump directly into solarpunk futures where we're eating ferns and hand-cranking batteries as a side gig?

Pretty standard cost-cutting efforts to maintain investor returns. Inflation and rising interest rates have hit bottom lines hard.

[Nintex]

Sony refunding Suicide Squad

Ori creator telling folks to buy their games on Steam

[Nintex]

WB quitting the AAA(A) games business and moving to F2P and GAAS

[Potato]

Seems like a bad idea given the industry problems associated with too much GAAS.

[chronovore]

Harry Pooter

[Nintex]

All of this looked very bland and meh, STALKER isn't even remastered, just a port.

[Potato]

How many of those are exclusive to this gen vs cross gen games?

[Nintex]

They were shown mostly as Xbox Series but I'm sure some of these are headed for PS4 and perhaps even Switch.

Anyway Ghost of Tushima is coming to PC in May and according to rumors Nixxes is going to port the other remaining first party PS5 exclusive games as well (Gran Turismo 7, Demon's Souls, God of War: Ragnarok etc.)

[Potato]

PC ports are one thing, but how the fuck are we still doing cross-gen games in 2024?

[Nintex]

Interesting interview with Peter. If that's the thinking at the big publishers than Nintendo has won yet another decade.

[TylenolJones]

PC ports are one thing, but how the fuck are we still doing cross-gen games in 2024?

Because consoles are PCs now so cross gen just means reducing the graphics settings.

[Nintex]

Another one bites the dust.

[Nintex]

PC ports are one thing, but how the fuck are we still doing cross-gen games in 2024?

I'll do you one better, STALKER Trilogy is a PS4 (Pro)/Xbox One (X) release, runs backwards compatible on PS5/Xbox Series X. 

[who is ted danson?]

PC + Nintendo won

[Nintex]

Roughly the same as the RX7800XT in terms of performance sounds like a significant uplift.

[Potato]

What's the point?

All the games are just PS4 games with a shiny coat of paint...it's not like they're using the power of the existing machine.

[Nintex]

It does make it very competitive with a current high end PC. But the price will be important.

The 7800XT still runs for about $489 so I don't think $499 is feasible unless AMD gave them a really good deal because they're worried about the console market. Rumor has it that AMD went to Nintendo with a very good offer to try and beat Nvidia for Switch 2 but Nintendo didn't budge. 

Still, I think $499 is already pushing it for consoles. I would've used the money to drop the PS5 Slim to $399 instead of spending billions to develop a PS5.5 as developers are already complaining about having to support so many platforms.

Plus this all means that once the PS6 comes out, the jump won't be as big from PS5 Pro to PS6. With that said I understand why they want to have a console on the market that can run GTAVI well and take the 'performance' crown from Xbox as that worked pretty well for Nvidia.

Anyway, at least we have an interesting hardware roadmap:
2024 - PS5 Pro
2025 - Switch 2
2026 - Next Gen Xbox

Also if PS5 Pro does release before Switch 2, I believe we will see the biggest performance gap in the same console generation ever. 
Switch is at ~ 1 Teraflops docked.