With confirmation that Sony will
no longer make discs for the PlayStation as of 2028, an ugly picture of the next generation of consoles is coming into shape.
Not only will the next PlayStation system–projected to launch by the same year–embrace the all-digital future, but the next Xbox, dubbed Project Helix, is likely to as well. Both systems are also facing a series of uphill battles, like memory shortages due to the increased demand of the AI tech bubble, which are likely to send prices even further through the roof. With all that's already come out about these systems, I'm convinced there's no reason to get one.
Plainly speaking,
what is there to be excited about in a potential PlayStation 6 or Project Helix? Who are these systems going to be for? Can these still be considered consoles for the casual gamer–the kind of person who just wants a reliable system that plays
Grand Theft Auto 6, the latest NBA2K game, and Call of Duty–when they probably launch out of the gate at around $1000? Or will this next ill-conceived crop of systems push players out of the console market indefinitely and potentially even out of games?
My initial thinking is that these consoles are for no one in particular. They are an "answer" to a contrived question that is being thrust upon the market by starved corporations. Nearly six years into the current console generation, it feels like these platforms have only just gotten off the ground, and yet there's already talk of these corporations gearing up to sell something no one really needs or finds themselves clamoring for.
Despite both Xbox and PlayStation pulling back from their expansions into other markets and betting big on exclusives in the future, there are perhaps fewer of them than ever and increasingly, especially in light of
continuous layoffs and closures, fewer developers curating a meaningfully diverse portfolio of titles for these systems. From the outside looking in, it would appear that both companies are in the business of shuttering studios rather than producing games and killer apps. And yet we are supposed to collectively buy into the idea that there will be any stable of teams making experiences for the next generation of consoles when
Bungie is being cut to the bone, studios like Double Fine and Compulsion Games have been cut loose from their first-party ownership, and a team the caliber of Arkane Lyon is dangling by a thread under its unwieldy and reckless management.
Each publisher and console manufacturer is seemingly aware of the hard sell that these systems will be and is entertaining or actively pursuing measures to deal with them being a bitter pill to swallow. Some believe that Xbox will leverage its subscription service
Game Pass, as well as cloud technology–a tool that has been used in abetting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and landed Microsoft in the
crosshairs of a BDS boycott–to get around the all-digital nature of these consoles and memory shortages now expected to extend till about 2030. Whenever Project Helix is released, it will reportedly also feature
flexible payment plans like those Xbox consoles currently support, in order to soften the blow of a purchase that could very well exceed $1000, much like the Steam Machine. And this new console has the unenviable task of trying to right the ship after
several tumultuous yearsof stewardship that have otherwise tainted the once-popular gaming brand.
On PlayStation's end, the cost-cutting move to stop producing discs for its consoles, as well as likely ditching an optical drive for its next system altogether, hurts a large swath of the audience the brand has amassed. Barring any significant revamp to PlayStation's digital policies moving forward–there are currently no gifting options, and good luck getting a refund on a store purchase—it just comes across like a way to
trap players in its ecosystem.
Getting rid of discs means that a PlayStation player may not be able to even loan a game to a friend if it's made from 2028 onwards. You'll no longer be able to buy a game, get your money's worth, and trade it back to a retailer or hand it off to someone else. It also means that players in regions of the world (or even the US) with lesser internet infrastructure will be at a massive detriment moving forward, if not outright excluded. Though internet service provider coverage areas have expanded greatly, service to them has not uniformly improved, and there are still a great deal of places around the country and world for which an all-digital future is a logistical nightmare.
Don't look forward to these special physical game releases in the next generation.
The move to digital also completely eradicates the used games market that might've popped up around the next PlayStation (a necessary good for an install base consisting of several income levels) and threatens every storefront that depended on sales of physical games on one of the most popular systems. Think of
iam8bit's boxed releases of games that never got a physical media launch, or even
Lost in Cult's Editions initiative that now has to account for zero sales on a prospective PS6 in a few years time.
No one likes GameStop, which looks like it'd
survive this shift anyway, but if it goes, so do many of the mom-and-pop shops with dwindling resources and now fewer games to move in the future.
Do either of these consoles sound all that appealing to anyone when their arrival portends such grim outcomes? Yet this is the current outlook on the next generation of increasingly expensive consoles, which is shaping up to be a real who's who of rake-steppers. And for what? To play the
same handful of games that'll be
updated for years to come to run ever so slightly better on these new platforms? I think Fortnite runs
just fine on my PS5, thank you very much.
If exclusives are
really meant to drive adoption, I've got some news for all parties involved: I wouldn't bet big on
true console exclusives moving forward, at least not the first few years of these consoles' lives. I'm sure there will be the occasional next-gen-only title, like Demon's Souls at the PS5's launch, but with sizable playerbases on current platforms and skyrocketing costs, there's no shot that the box in your living room right now will stop getting the most significant game releases of the next several years, including well into the next generation's lifetime.
You'll probably be able to play big games like GTA 6 on modern consoles for a while.
Your PS5 and Xbox Series X and S will be able to play GTA 6 (and its
eventual online component) for a long while, especially as these consoles are not entirely on their last legs. Moreover, they will definitely play the indie games and smaller titles that these systems are going to have to rely on, since developing AAA games now costs
far too muchand can take upwards of five years, and still yield disastrous results.
Cost is really the big issue here though, and it'll remain the big issue for years to come since it exacerbates the fact that it's unclear what anyone is supposed to be buying into with a new console, apart from the promise of marginal increases in performance. Shawn Layden, once head of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, spoke plainly about the
console race years ago, saying, "We're fighting over teraflops and that's no place to be… Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we've reached the ceiling."
Maybe upgraded specs and increased graphical fidelity were reason enough to upgrade when a console
cost a few hundred dollars and the leaps were massive, but neither is really the case anymore. The "jump" from even the baseline PS5 and the souped-up PS5 Pro has largely been
negligible, especially if you lack all of the other (also expensive) gear to make it shine. Shorter load times and the ability to render miniscule details are certainly nice, but are they thousands-of-dollars nice? Because if gamers think that getting a console now when a PS5 Pro costs $900 is nasty business, just wait till the
next high-end system is released in the midst of these crises.
A bunch of people who've thus far been safe from the reckoning tearing through the tech space are quickly going to figure out that their favorite pastime is
no longer viable in the current capitalist hellscape. And that's not to say that some folks won't buy these new consoles still (especially at launch and under the guise of pay-in-four schemes), but I'd be surprised if they sold half as well in the same time as the current console generation. And where will the stragglers go?
Mobile is a major gaming platform across the world, and stands to become more popular.
Some suspect that gamers will flock to mobile, considering the ubiquity of phones and the relatively low cost of the platform's shovelware and vast free-to-play market. Some, I suspect, will make the jump, stretch their dollars as wide as they can, and adopt PCs or hybrids of PCs and consoles like the Steam Machine. Nintendo appears to be, as always, doing its own thing largely uninterrupted with the
success of the Switch line–though it is
no stranger to rakes either–and I suspect that handhelds like the Steam Deck will remain an alternative, albeit one that is also rising in costs.
Others may leave games altogether. Matt Booty, current head of Xbox Game Studios, said that Xbox's primary competition isn't really PlayStation or Nintendo, but
TikTok and other vectors for short-form video, which are increasingly capturing the attention of younger audiences. This would be in line with the findings from analyst Matthew Ball's
annual report on the state of gaming published earlier this year, which claimed that gaming was losing in the "
War For Attention" to other pastimes like TikTok. All the while, the current gaming audience is
getting older and shrinking. A super-costly console generation might be enough reason for those people to find something else to spend their money on.
If I can be so real, most of this just reads like the
end of the console space; the collapse of a significant portion of not just an industry, but a culture. It feels like we're witnessing the beginning of the end of video games as we know them, and the ushering in of something I can't quite place.
