Fans of retro gaming, what makes you bite on upgrading?

So, I don't usually buy systems at launch. I have a PS4, and I waited until a price drop, and there were enough titles that I wanted to play that it felt like it was worth snagging one. In that case, I ended up getting Metal Gear Solid V, Witcher 3, and Batman: Arkham Knight right off the bat. It also helps that my brother was also interested in a few games as well. Interestingly, he later bought his own PS4 so he didn't tie up what is now mine, mainly because he plays a lot of online stuff these days. I bought out my "half" of the PS4. I held out on the 3DS as well initially, until the price drop made it worthwhile.

There are exceptions, though. It seems to revolve around certain games, though. I bought a GBA right around launch, because it came out with Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Given my love of SotN, it made it a no-brainer. When the Wii came out, the promise of the platform was enough to get me to bite, but even more pressing was that it launched with Twilight Princess. While I skipped the Wii U until there was a sale and Super Mario 3D World was out, the Switch saw the restoration of the same pattern as the Wii: new Zelda game = purchase. So basically, just launch with a Zelda game and I'll probably buy the system.

It's always hard to balance the retro and the modern from a time perspective, simply because modern games tend to be a lot longer. This year I'm running a fairly even split, but last year was really unbalanced towards modern. Of course, a lot of the "modern" was actually retro indie throwbacks, which don't feel modern at all.

I have a Switch because it’s basically like a PS3 in the form of an iPad mini. This appeals to me because it makes it possible to play in ways I just couldn’t before. However, PS4 and XBO are not that much of an upgrade. Over the past 25 years I have gone from NES to Genesis to N64 to Gamecube to a Windows PC that could play Crysis on medium settings. So I have the context and perspective to say that this generation does have much to offer over the last one. For me, that makes it a hard sell at best.

The PS4 and XBO have a better GPU and more RAM than the PS3 and 360. But they have the same CPU. So the shaders and textures look a little prettier but the underlying simulation is almost exactly the same. I’m not interested in legacy game engines with higher resolutions and frame rates. I want a more advanced simulation with interactivity that wasn’t possible before. This feeds into my deeper underlying grievance that mainstream gaming is more about spectacle and set pieces than interactivity. Most people think that if something looks complex and deep, then that means it must intrinsically be complex and deep.

In 2018 certain current-gen console games are pioneering amazing game engines forcing me to acknowledge this generation is hitting its stride. But this doesn’t address another problem, namely that games have also grown more corporate. I mean like $60 retail games that nickel and dime players in ways that only free to play iPhone games used to. Also, a few high profile, current-gen sequels I was interested in got middling reviews. And I can’t forget my overwhelming mountain of XBOX 360 games. I picked them up for between $1 and $10 because people donated and pawned them off. Theses games are getting sequels, remasters, and ports now. But I have the originals in my closet and haven’t even booted them up.

The currently available upgrade advanced enough to pique my interest would be a PC with an HTC Vive headset and an RTX-enabled Nvidia GPU, but that would be idiotic because A) the tech is too immature to be any more than a novelty, and B) electronics nose dive in price over time. If I were to spend that kind of money on whatever my heart wanted, I’d put it somewhere it could snowball compound interest over time, not squander it on a toy that’ll be worthless in 15 years. Retro gaming prices have climbed over the past 10 years and that probably has something to do with why I’ll buy a CIB Sega Genesis game before a retail PS4 game.

There's less of a gap, but there's definitely a gap. It might not be PS2 to PS3, but there's some really nice looking games out there, and a lot of the time you get some extra smoothness out of the deal, too.

Also, the CPUs are pretty much the same in the PS4/XB1, but they're both wildly different architectures as compared to last generation (360/PS3).  Both decided to go down the "PC" route, basically making a fairly cheap PC gaming rig this gen.  The advantage is that the toolchains are really mature, and it makes things easier to port to PC.  It also cuts down on development costs, which continue to be ridiculous in the AAA space.

Yeah I think I'm done. Whenever I look at something like PS4 and Xbone I think about how many great Atari 2600, PC Engine, or Super Famicom games I could get with the same financial investment. I vastly prefer retro to modern games, so the answer is clear. 

Also, and this is kinda goofy, but I've seriously run out of shelf space and places to hook up consoles to my televisions. I'm slowing down on the "collecting" aspect in general.