Sony's Promise and Microsoft's Futility


Both Sony and Microsoft announced game consoles today, one was vague and was more of "hey this is coming" sort of thing and the other was "yep, this is a thing, buy it now." Both are interesting and I feel like this is a great time to talk about both it and the future of the games industry as a whole.

Sony today dropped the "this is coming" news with the announcement of the Playstation 5, a brand new games console from Sony that runs AMD's Zen 2 architecture and NAVI GPU and promises backwards compatibility with PS4 games, raytracing, use of SSD's, and up to 8K support. So let's unpack all of this. I appreciate the use of PS4 games on the PS5, that was something missing from the PS4 that upset a lot of folks and only a little bit of it made sense; the lack of PS3 BC made sense because the PS3 was an archeticual nightmare but not even having PS1 or PS2 support just felt wack. SSD's are always appreciated and are slowly becoming the way of the future, becoming even cheaper than just a year ago. Raytracing sounds promising but NVIDIA couldn't make it work well, how is Sony gonna pull it off with a less powerful console? Also, 8K sounds nice but we don't even have 8K displays yet outside of professional work and, not gonna lie, I think 4K is the point of diminishing returns. Hell there are still people using 1080p just fine so 8K comes off as merely marketing for the masses while being something only practical to content creators.
Of course, this is all depending on AMD; if Zen 2 and NAVI are the next major leap forward promised by AMD then 8K and raytracing could be possible. But while AMD has been on a roll essentially becoming the PC Gaming mid-range king, the high end market is still out of their reach and NAVI will have to be on par with the RTX 2070 in order to stand a chance. The PS5 may not be out till 2020 but 2019 will really be the test year for the console.

One thing I do appreciate though about the PS5 is that physical media will still be a thing which leads us to Microsoft. Today they announced the Xbox One S Digital which will be a download only variant on the Xbox One S and to be honest? They shouldn't have bothered. Coming in at $250, the Xbox One S is on par with a Ryzen 3 APU based PC and frankly Microsoft has no exclusives to justify it. The only thing the S had was 4K Blu-Ray support and without that? Paperweight.

One could argue that a Ryzen system is $70 more but the here's the kicker. The games packaged (Sea of Thieves, Forza, and Minecraft) require XBL Gold to use properly, which is $50 a year or $10 a month. So if we add $50-100 depending on monthly vs yearly price to the system we get in the $300-350 range and look at that you can build an equally powerful PC for the same cost with enough left over for Xbox Games Pass on PC and free games like Warframe. And with Halo coming to PC Xbox has really nothing to offer that a PC doesn't which makes removing Blu-Ray support a bad idea.

Granted, I'm also stubborn and hate the idea of not actually owning my games and movies so the Xbox One S All Digital sets me the wrong way unlike the PS5. Though right now the PS5 is just a dev kit whereas the One S Digital is a real product with a pre-order. Though to me the disc on the One S is the same as the headphone jack on the iPhone, without it you're looking at a fancy paperweight. Dunno how I'm gonna deal when physical going away... piracy? I'll figure it out.

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