Hi Era, this is my first thread and I hope it's an interesting one to all of you!
Hearing a lot of gaming outlets talk about the next generation of consoles being upon us is so tiring. There's been lots of speculation about the next Xbox and the presumed Playstation 5, whether or not it'll have a focus on streaming, native 4K, or in Microsoft's case, whether their streaming services expand to even beyond their own console. But IMO, this generation really feels like it only got into its groove not that long ago, like early 2016, when games starting coming out in more consistent quality. With development costs already astronomically rising this generation, studio closures, etc., are new consoles from Sony and Microsoft actually a solution for anybody?
I had a convo with Penguin on Twitter a while ago, where he stated that the games industry needs to be better at promoting games already released instead of immediately jumping to the next thing (and he's 100% right), and I think we need to do the same with consoles. Any developers that frequent Era, please feel free to school me on this, but I feel like, at this point in a console's lifecycle, more streamlined development infrastructure is in place after studios have already released one or two big games for these platforms, and now studios can actually make some high caliber games more smoothly in the later years. I used to constantly criticize Nintendo for putting games out on 3DS when the Switch was so popular, but now I see why they did; they were probably stupid cheap and super easy to make.
The Switch is a separate issue because besides bringing something actually new to the gaming landscape, it solves a problem for multiple parties, but I think it'd be better to use this time to polish games/take risks. Use this time to maybe make a game like Anthem that isn't bugged to hell, take risks on new entries in fairly niche series; the financial risk is much smaller at this time for Devil May Cry 5 or something like a new Dino Crisis instead of making it when you're learning new hardware at the same time. Just take some chances on new games, and surprise your audience a little bit. I think it's okay to just exist in this space for a while.
What do you all think?
Hearing a lot of gaming outlets talk about the next generation of consoles being upon us is so tiring. There's been lots of speculation about the next Xbox and the presumed Playstation 5, whether or not it'll have a focus on streaming, native 4K, or in Microsoft's case, whether their streaming services expand to even beyond their own console. But IMO, this generation really feels like it only got into its groove not that long ago, like early 2016, when games starting coming out in more consistent quality. With development costs already astronomically rising this generation, studio closures, etc., are new consoles from Sony and Microsoft actually a solution for anybody?
I had a convo with Penguin on Twitter a while ago, where he stated that the games industry needs to be better at promoting games already released instead of immediately jumping to the next thing (and he's 100% right), and I think we need to do the same with consoles. Any developers that frequent Era, please feel free to school me on this, but I feel like, at this point in a console's lifecycle, more streamlined development infrastructure is in place after studios have already released one or two big games for these platforms, and now studios can actually make some high caliber games more smoothly in the later years. I used to constantly criticize Nintendo for putting games out on 3DS when the Switch was so popular, but now I see why they did; they were probably stupid cheap and super easy to make.
The Switch is a separate issue because besides bringing something actually new to the gaming landscape, it solves a problem for multiple parties, but I think it'd be better to use this time to polish games/take risks. Use this time to maybe make a game like Anthem that isn't bugged to hell, take risks on new entries in fairly niche series; the financial risk is much smaller at this time for Devil May Cry 5 or something like a new Dino Crisis instead of making it when you're learning new hardware at the same time. Just take some chances on new games, and surprise your audience a little bit. I think it's okay to just exist in this space for a while.
What do you all think?
