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Post by Xeogred on Aug 31, 2022 20:21:02 GMT -5
Sony Playstation 5 release date: November 12, 2020 Xbox Series X release date: November 10, 2020 Nearly two full years later, it's still hard to find PS5's. It's still hard to come up with a tiny list on one hand of pure next gen exclusives. Cutting edge games that make you think the new console was worth it and we've reached another height in the medium's tech or game design.
Is the gaming landscape changing for the worse slower than I and others may have expected? Will things recover from this strange moment in history or will they never be the same again? Is this slow churning stagnation ever going to end?
- There is still a lingering parts shortage from a global pandemic. - All the while the world is entering a global recession. - A lot of giant developers/publishers failed to swiftly adapt to the remote work situation so development has slowed and fallen behind on many projects.
- For a rare or perhaps first time in history, Sony is raising the price of the PS5 in just about every region outside the USA. - Sony and other AAA publishers like EA are pushing for more expensive price points like bumping everything to $70. - Sony isn't behind big budget singe player games anymore.- Xbox cares more about getting people into their Games Pass ecosystem rather than selling physical hardware/software. A model that has already changed the landscape across other media as physical media drains away. - Xbox purchasing Activision, Bethesda, and the neverending reach of Western mega corporations seems to have no end in sight with monopolistic oversight that history has proven doesn't do any good in the long run. Creativity and freedom will be stifled after the honeymoon period is over and the bottom line is all that the suits want. - Rumors of even EA and Square Enix wanting to be bought out continue to boil every few months. Even from the likes of Apple, Amazon, or Tencent ... whom have done nothing good for the industry. Compared to them, Nintendo still seems like a gaming company right now. Maybe arguably a bit lazy with how they seem to intentionally go cheap on tech, but it's about the games first and at least we still get some exclusives, new IP's here and there, etc.
Sony is not even a Japanese company at this point and it shows. Hard to see any positives from their and Xbox's long term game plans here. A page is turning in gaming history and it may never be the same.
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I'm being a bit over dramatic here for sure. But just had a lot of nightmare thoughts today on the current situation. And I can only predict two possible routes...
- Good: Some kind of miraculous new tech comes around that makes parts/development more affordable and easier again. Perhaps Sony/Xbox/Nintendo all make a new system faster than expected and we move on from this weird time in gaming history to something more positive and exciting again.
- Bad/More than likely: This could drag on even longer than the 7th gen (~2005-2015), it could even still take another year, MULTIPLE, to finally get true current gen exclusives. For the "current gen" that supposedly started in Q4 2020, to finally really start. But these companies will want to make up for their monstrous losses and bleed these systems dry until the end of time. The stagnation is already here. Will it drag on for a decade or more? Seems very possible.
We're drowning in options for games. I don't see that changing. But it really does seem like gaming is changing in weird, painfully slow ways that I didn't really expect. This "generation" got dealt a bad card, yes, but we're two, TWO YEARS into it and nothing has changed. The forgiveness period is over and this is going to be such a nasty spot in the history books no matter how you cut it.
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Post by Ex on Sept 1, 2022 1:39:41 GMT -5
I pretty much agree with all you said. I also agree with Jeff in that it doesn't feel like the 9th gen has started yet. I don't think we've yet seen the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 stretch their wings at all. (I don't consider the Switch 9th gen, I consider it Nintendo's late 8th gen replacement for the failed Wii U.) The 9th gen was dealt a bad hand regarding the whole pandemic aspect and how that affected hardware supply and studio development schedules. Hard to deny that reality. But this industry is also at the point of diminishing returns when it comes to graphics. To really push the XSX and PS5 to their limits takes very, very expensive pixel work. More and more publishers are becoming gun shy about dumping millions into a AAA project that might not break even, let alone profit. Who can blame them when you look at the highest revenue grossing games of 2021: vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games_of_2021None of the top 10 games there are AAA console exclusives rocking crazy next gen graphics. Not hardly. Instead publishers making the most money, are doing so by perfecting the art of mobile monetization. And let me tell you, there are far far more mobile casual players willing to blow loads of cash on micro transactions, then there are hardcore players willing to spend $500+ on a console and $70 per game. If you're a publicly traded publisher, it becomes harder and harder to justify to your shareholders why you should spend millions on a AAA game with short legs, instead of a million on a mobile game that could make millions in long legged monetization. It could stand to reason that consoles are the dinosaurs of the video game industry, and are facing inevitable extinction. Trust me, I didn't enjoy typing that any more than you did reading it. It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft's Xbox department eventually turning into a streaming VR game service company. Sony's gaming division not producing a PS6, but instead turning towards PC game development of Sony's IPs. And Nintendo partnering with a smartphone company to produce a Nintendo phone with exclusive Nintendo game apps. I hope none of that happens, but if it did in ten years that wouldn't surprise me. I don't see 2023 being the year that the XSX and PS5 rise and shine. Reliable market forecasts show 2023 to be global recession at best. Maybe 2025 will be a banner year for XSX and PS5 though. Hope so! I legitimately feel bad for folks that jumped on PS5 early hoping for the next gen of great graphics and killer exclusives. Meanwhile the PS4 just wants to die but Sony can't let it.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 1, 2022 19:52:19 GMT -5
(I don't consider the Switch 9th gen, I consider it Nintendo's late 8th gen replacement for the failed Wii U.) That is a funny truth. Wasn't even the Wii a little offset from the normal schedule too though? It feels like it's been weird forever now on where exactly Nintendo's hardware fits in the timeline.
This list... is depressing incarnate. On one hand this is the first time I'm seeing a list like this right before my eyes, on the other, it's stuff I've heard about for years now on podcasts and such. But seeing it is kind of surreal in a dark way.
Near the top of the list: Call of Duty: Mobile Mobile Activision / Tencent / Garena F2P $768,000,000
Further down in like the bottom 20%: Call of Duty: Vanguard Multi-platform Activision P2P $200,000,000+
Kind of wild just simply seeing that comparison. CoD's main releases have been the console juggernauts for about a decade or longer at this point. But I'm not surprised at all to see the F2P stuff that completely dominates it listed above there. I have a 10 year old nephew and what does he mainly play? Fortnite, Rocket League, and Minecraft.
For my tastes and what I want out of the industry... I do hear a lot of promising things about the current Unreal Engine and it continues to make development faster/easier/cheaper to use. But yeah, the costs for AAA games has been through the roof and it's such a high risk even for giant corporations.
Maybe we really have just hit complete stagnation with graphical achievements and leaps. They'll continue to improve but the "wow" factor of the past may never really happen again for us older gamers.
We're living in the indie boom at least, like I said at the end of my rambling there, we're never going to run out of options for games and genres of the old we prefer. There's probably always going to be something for us. But... gaming is changing, or arguably already has in the last few years and is going to continue to evolve in undesirable ways. Strange times.
2025 does seem like a good prediction to me.
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Post by Ex on Sept 1, 2022 20:46:49 GMT -5
I do hear a lot of promising things about the current Unreal Engine and it continues to make development faster/easier/cheaper to use. Cheaper/easier means more copy/paste, more homogeneous looking games. The Unity effect. If future graphics can beat the "wow" rush of going from NES to Dreamcast in one decade... that'd be a helluva trick. To an extent. I don't see much in the way of SCUBA sims, mech sims, air combat sims, and such from the indie sector. But yeah if you want action-platformers, adventure/VN, and metroidvanias indies' got your back. The biggest hindrance will be lack of disposable income to drive gaming sales. The next few years are not looking to be kind to the wallets of average joe gamer.
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Post by anayo on Sept 2, 2022 12:12:38 GMT -5
There was this one podcast interview with John Carmack I listened to a year or so ago. He kept saying, “We’ve been able to fit a PC from 15 years ago inside a smart phone. But I don’t expect we’ll see that happen again in the next 15 years.” Even if we’ve saturated the number of transistors we can fit on a chip, I wonder if AI might give us “NES to Dreamcast within 10 years” levels of progress again. Nvidia graphics cards can already use DLSS to add detail that isn’t actually there to lower-res gameplay. There was a recent article where a guy won 1st place in a state fair art contest by submitting an image generated by the AI “Midjourney”. He never lifted a brush, he just typed some key words and the AI spat out his “ artwork”. Admittedly that is just one still frame, and the guy who submitted it to the state fair had to hand-pick it from a bunch of other AI generated images that didn’t make the cut. But I’ve been wondering if this could one day see games with content in them which human designers never specifically came up with. What would that do to a game's replay value? There was also that Google employee who got relieved of his job because he was convinced Google’s AI chatbot was sentient. When I was a kid it seemed lame how I could press A and the shopkeeper would say “Welcome to my shop!” no matter how many times I pressed it. Even if I ran around in my underwear doing cartwheels, the shopkeepers reaction would never change. I wondered if future video games would have NPCs that could react to my shenanigans without a human programmer specifically accounting for every possible thing I could do. Similarly, I felt letdown when there were games with spoken dialog where I could type my own name, but then the voice actors would never actually say my name. They’d talk around it or call my character by his title or something. At the time I knew it was because they couldn’t make voice actors say enunciate every possible name in the recording studio. But with AI you don’t have to do that anymore. There’s a skyrim mod out right now where you can name yourself “xX_dragon_killer_420_69_Xx” and the NPCs will say it. I guess what I’m trying to say here is there’s some really weird stuff going on in the computing world right now. Maybe the next “NES to Dreamcast” leap won’t look the way anyone expects it to because it won’t be simply be an extrapolation of the kind of progress we’ve already seen.
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Post by Ex on Sept 2, 2022 14:14:11 GMT -5
Some interesting points anayo, though you're taking us in multiple directions. I'll touch on a few points: >I wonder if AI might give us “NES to Dreamcast within 10 years” levels of progress again.With AI help possibly. In order to produce ultra realistic graphics, or graphics that look like a true living painting (like say the image you linked above), currently that requires extreme processing power and massive investment of human resources. It may come to pass that AI can accomplish these tasks procedurally, but it would still take massive processing power. The likes of which would put the rendering into "the cloud" and the output delivered to players via real-time streaming. Yes we're talking about "cloud gaming" or whatever the idiotic marketing term is these days. >Nvidia graphics cards can already use DLSS to add detail that isn’t actually there to lower-res gameplay.
It adds detail, but the net effect is more like 20x anisotropic filtering. From what I've seen it's not adding new lighting effects or spatial particle disbursement. It's not adding ray tracing or more accurate volumetric shadowing. It's basically just taking what's there and sharpening up the image. I'm not saying DLSS won't make a blurry game look nicer. Just saying it's not recreating the graphics in a creative new way or anything dramatic. >There was a recent article where a guy won 1st place in a state fair art contest by submitting an image generated by the AI
I wonder what AI image generating platform he used. A few years ago I wondered if somebody would do this; use an image generating program then have the output put onto canvas via a "painting printer". There is a market for this I'm sure. >could one day see games with content in them which human designers never specifically came up with. >What would that do to a game's replay value?
Procedurally generated gameplay, and procedurally generated graphics, are nothing new. This idea and execution of the concept has been around since the '70s at least (see roguelikes). However, taking the concept to an extreme would be new. We already have novels, music, paintings and other media 100% created by AI generation. Is it possible for an FPS game's levels and enemies to be completely generated by AI on the fly? Yes, that's already been done in multiple fairly recent FPS titles. But what about an action-adventure or survival horror? I say it's possible and will happen eventually. We will eventually see dynamically created games that respond to the player's actions and whims. We will see games that 100% create the graphics, music, scenarios and all of that procedurally. Does that mean those games will be as good as human handmade games though? That is the real question. It's not a matter of "is it possible?" but rather "is it better?" >was also that Google employee who got relieved of his job because he was convinced Google’s AI chatbot was sentientThat's a deep subject, and well worth discussing, but perhaps not in this thread. I'd be happy to discuss AI sentience and ethics with you guys in a dedicated thread though. >I wondered if future video games would have NPCs that could react to my shenanigansI say yes, yes we will have that. We already see that in dynamic combat AI behavior. Extrapolating that to emotional situational behavior is not an outlandish prospect. >there’s a skyrim mod out right now where you can name yourself “xX_dragon_killer_420_69_Xx” and the NPCs will say it
I agree more games should use xVASynth 2. But again, voice synthesis technology has been around for decades. It's nothing new. It's just gotten a lot better recently. >Maybe the next “NES to Dreamcast” leap won’t look the way anyone expects it to because it won’t be simply be an extrapolation of the >kind of progress we’ve already seen.You make a good point there. Grognard gamers like me grew up in an era where graphics drove the medium's progress. In the 9th generation if we've truly reached the point of diminishing returns pixel saturation... the medium must look to another paradigm for continued evolution. The interweaving of advanced AI into all aspects of video game execution could very well be that paradigm. That is a fine point and I'm glad you brought it up. It's worth discussing further and in more detail. But "can AI reinvent the video game medium" doesn't solve the crash that Xeogred was initially talking about. The issue the 9th generation of video gaming is facing now, is a lack of material resources, and a lack of disposable income from its demographic. People are by definition becoming poorer at an alarming rate. Economies are tumbling world over, currencies are devaluing, and reliable economic forecasters are indicating some tough years ahead. Tough like global recession at best tough. When the choice becomes "do I pay my rent or do I buy that new PS5 game" that's not a choice at all. I do think the global economy will recover again, and will recover strongly, but that may not be until 2025. This is why I don't see the 9th generation of gaming truly taking off, until midway through this decade or in its latter. When that time comes though, I think we'll see some amazing new ideas in this medium. And I agree, those ideas won't be amazing because of shiny pixels.
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Post by paulofthewest on Sept 2, 2022 18:02:05 GMT -5
Wow a lot of things to unpack here so here is my 2 cents: Is the second major gaming crash coming soon? I doubt it, but I actually hope it does so someone can rise from the ashes. Innovation seems to be at a low. I think the pause it more about economic situation more than anything else. Okay I'm on the publisher's side on this one. I paid $50 for SMB3, which is just over $150 in today's money. Yes, as Ex put in another thread SMB3 is worth $150, but the fact that games have hung around $50 - $60 means the scale of gaming sales has increase substantially. At some point it has to break and right now it has to fight inflation. It sadly seems to be the future. I really miss the big box games, especially the PC ones. The thief box is iconic to me. That is probably the most depressing thing on your list. (I don't consider the Switch 9th gen, I consider it Nintendo's late 8th gen replacement for the failed Wii U.) That is a funny truth. Wasn't even the Wii a little offset from the normal schedule too though? It feels like it's been weird forever now on where exactly Nintendo's hardware fits in the timeline. I had to look this up, but Wikipedia lists the Wii U and Switch as 8th gen. They defined 9th gen as systems that can perform ray tracing at 60 fps. So there is some innovation there... Although I don't see Nintendo going the horsepower route anytime soon. If future graphics can beat the "wow" rush of going from NES to Dreamcast in one decade... that'd be a helluva trick. There was this one podcast interview with John Carmack I listened to a year or so ago. He kept saying, “We’ve been able to fit a PC from 15 years ago inside a smart phone. But I don’t expect we’ll see that happen again in the next 15 years.” I agree with the statements, but I think it misses what is going on. While Moore's law has held for now and for the reasonable future (people have been saying Moore's law is dead for decades) the real issue is what to do with the transistor real estate. Originally we made processors with faster clocks, but we hit the heat wall. We then added more cores, but seriously how many do you use for your games? We have bigger caches, but even that has diminishing returns. We made phones portable and then small, but how much smaller do we need? Actually, the inverse is happening with the large screens on phones. So, right now we make fatter GPUs. So to answer your question: Possibly and I hope so, but I doubt it. AI in particular is difficult since no one has come up with general/strong AI. I'm actually waiting for the meta move: an AI to produce AIs. Ha, a quick Google search came up with Google AutoML. Nonetheless, so far we do find things to use the transistors for, just not always the way we want.
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Post by anayo on Sept 2, 2022 21:40:54 GMT -5
I focused so much on “Moore’s Law running out” cause I see that as the table leg most likely to break and cause a gaming “crash.” I put “crash” in quotation marks because I’m not sure the outcome would be a 1983 style crash. I’m thinking more like video games changing form into something that the members of HRG wouldn’t like very much. Like that time Nintendo went after casual gamers with the Wii. Or whatever Microsoft thought they were doing with their ridiculous “TV TV TV TV TV” Xbox One E3 presentation because smartphone games were exploding and they thought that home consoles wouldn’t be a thing anymore. I think if the 2022 video game market did have a 1983 style crash, it would be due to a supply chain breakdown, like if China decided to take Taiwan back. But then a lot of other stuff would crash too and we’d have much bigger problems on our hands. I get the impression that people today really want new consoles even if they’re expensive and rent is going up. PS5 and Series X sell as soon as they’re on store shelves. Then many of those units get scalped for even more. ( Somebody was buying all those $900 PS5s on eBay.) But actually manufacturing enough of them and getting them in people’s hands is straining the system. Somehow I see this as more of a symptom of chips getting harder and harder to make rather than other problems in the world. He used Midjourney. Here’s what I found about running Stable Diffusion on a PC: It’s anyone’s guess how closely future PC’s will catch up to today’s “cloud”. But I do know the PS5 and Series X don’t have any silicon inside them for hardware-acclerated AI. I have a feeling that won’t be the case for the PS6 and the next XBOX.
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Post by Ex on Oct 31, 2022 10:31:41 GMT -5
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Post by anayo on Oct 31, 2022 14:45:48 GMT -5
In Sony co-founder Akio Morita's book "Made in Japan" he talks about when a customer approached him with a large order that was beyond his capacity to manufacture. To meet the order, he would have to expand his company's factory. Morita knew the deal would profit him in the short term, but the factory expansion would entail future recurring costs. He didn't know whether future sales volume would stay high enough to cover those costs. So, Morita gave the customer a rate where he could pay a cheaper rate on fewer units, or a more expensive rate on more units. The customer said, "This doesn't make sense. What you are offering me is literally the opposite of a bulk discount." Then Morita explained that if he expanded his manufacturing capacity, that meant he was taking on risk, so he had to charge more. The customer said, "Oh, I understand now." I wonder if anyone still does that today, or if everyone's so drunk on the pursuit of short term profit that they just YOLO their way from one unsustainable gambit to the next. There are certainly "gold rushes" where you can make nonsensical amounts of money when the planets align. I'm not saying not to cash in on those if you can. But I'm really wondering what kind of risk assessment has gone into cryptocurrency, or if it's really just "let's assume this is going to continue forever." This is why I brought up how the Wii targeted casual audiences who don't usually play games. In the short term, I'm sure it was very profitable for Nintendo to sell a $200 board game to soccer moms and nursing homes. It was very clever of Nintendo to target new audiences, but those people just aren't repeat customers. I don't know anyone fitting that description who keeps up with Nintendo's latest thing 15 years later. Similarly, I'm sure Nvidia enjoyed tremendous short term profit selling their money printers GPUs to crypto bros. But crypto bros aren't buying GPUs because they love PC gaming. People who love PC gaming are the ones who will still want a new GPU 15 years in the future.
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