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Former PlayStation exec says console arms race has plateaued
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn't a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don't even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It's one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.
Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little 'arms race' about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.
In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5's no-games failure and the fact I haven't even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.
While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don't see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they've proven time and time again that they're hostile towards their fanbase (and I'm not talking about pirated games here).
I also don't see how the Switch brought a "fresh, intuitive control scheme" to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of "Pro" controllers.
And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we're at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most "revolutionary" title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn't much in there that truly surprised me.
YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn't something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.
I personally think indie games or games from "large-but-based" studios are more important than ever and that's where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.
Oh yeah, I wouldn't say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn't something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it's very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.
They've got like... what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that's exclusive to their hardware.
-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros
Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon
All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I'm convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.
Where Sony/MS have uhhh... Looks at the PS5 exclusive games... Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite...
While Fortnite, League and Genshin have quietly mopped the floor.
Nintendo suck though, their main console was so underpowered they couldnt run AAA games natively, their store is the biggest example of shovelware ever, like early days play store. Nintendo charge ridiculous money constantly for everything from peripherals and accessories to decade old ports. Speaking of ports they are overly reliant on them because their library is lacking. This is before we get into their build quality issues.
They are not a saviour, I appreciate they dont chase trends like AI and such but they will always fuck users when they can.
It was their MO, at least with the N64 and GameCube.