I am still kinda surprised Xbox is still doing hardware at all
Considering Playstation is likely to have all of Xbox’s exclusives, I’m surprised Xbox is going forward with their console. It feels like another Xbox One disaster.
Keeping my Xbox X as long as it runs. It took me until 2 years ago to spend the money on this one
Well, time to whip out the old Red Ring machine.
I have to say, I honestly can’t tell the difference between my Xbox One vs my series X. I wish I hadn’t upgraded
I have to say, I honestly can’t tell the difference between my Xbox One vs my series X. I wish I hadn’t upgraded
One of them has a 5400 RPM HDD and the other an NVMe SSD. You can’t tell me the Series X still takes half an hour to boot up and another half an hour to launch a game?
Okay, I guess it’s PC then.
Stares at RAM and GPU prices
You don’t have to play current gen AAA games. They are crazy expensive anyway.
laughs in old ebay acquisitions and retro games
You’re sitting on a gold mine - first DDR6/HBM, then DDR5, then DDR4 got expensive. If trends continue, somewhere around 2028 you’ll be able to sell that desoldered 128KB of SNES RAM for a fortune.
Hoping DDR3 prices go up so I can finally sell the 128 GB of RAM I have been saving “just in case” lol
DDR6
Huh?
Memory that is embedded in GPUs.
They don’t use DDR at all, the datacenter ones use HBM (I think 3 or 4 now) and normal GPUs use GDDR7 or 6/X but GDDR is not the same as DDR and we could even have GDDR8 before DDR6.
You’re technically correct. The best kind of correct. Thanks.
I got my new gaming laptop during black friday sales, a few weeks before the AIpocalypse started. The exact laptop I got then is now 400 euro more!
Don’t forget storage prices now too and not just NVMe drives. I can’t wait for this AI hoarding to finally fucking crash. It’s like the mining shit we had with GPUs in steroids. Ugh.
That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/
Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp
Hope they know, you don’t have to launch a console every half dozen years. Could just hold off and y’know, not for a while. A long while.
I know it’s because I’m getting old, but it seems like PS5 just came out. But part of it too is diminishing returns on tech advances. The difference is more and more negligible every gen. And that’s for AAA; for most developers on real-world budgets, I doubt many are even hitting console power bottlenecks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles
The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony’s PlayStation 5.[1][2][3]
The duration from the eighth generation until the start of the ninth was one of the longest in history, having started in 2012 with the release of Nintendo’s Wii U. Past generations typically had five-year windows as a result of Moore’s law,[10] but Microsoft and Sony instead launched mid-console redesigns, the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.[11] Microsoft also launched a monthly console lease program, with the option to buy or upgrade.[12] Some analysts believed these factors signaled the first major shift away from the idea of console generations because the potential technical gains of new hardware had become nominal.[13]
The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there’d be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to 2028.
Most indie devs end up using tools like unreal engine as they are not developing engines in house like what used to be the case for AAA studios. Hell even most AAA studios end up using unreal as well now do to how good it can look if you have the best hardware out there with minimal effort. This unfortunately means a lot of games run into console power bottlenecks, hell it even is a problem with PC players, some games even run like shit on 5090s. Considering the current gen was sold as supposedly 4k ready gaming systems this over reliance on unreal for its beautiful but severely unoptimized graphical capabilities means a lot of games run like shit on consoles when people are using them attached to 4k tvs like they had been advertised to work well with.
I will say if they didnt push for a next gen though it would benefit all gamers pc and console alike. It would force the devs for these games to start actually optimizing for the hardware out there and realize they dont need to turn on every bell and whistle in unreal to make a fun game. It would be so nice if games could go back to using reasonable minimum specs. There isnt a need to have photorealistic graphics if only a handful of people can even run your game, the gameplay is much more important as is having a stable framerate. Not to mention games before nannite, ray tracing, etc all looked phenomenal anyways once a little tlc was put into crafting the shaders and textures, if we took a step back from all the excess now we would have games looking amazing and performing great on all variations of hardware.
- The price Sony and MS pay for RAM will keep going up regardless of whether there is a hardware refresh or not. So keeping the old version won’t keep consumer costs down. If they don’t refresh the cost increases will just look sillier.
- They avoid having to search for time on older process nodes while fabs try to migrate to newer ones by updating periodically.
All this to play PS4 Remasters on one and PC games on the other
I will not pay $1000 for a console alone. I would buy a gaming PC for 4x that first. And I’m exactly their target market.
I wonder who they’re trying to sell these to. Back in 2002 the Xbox cost 480e and it was already very expensive. The 360 was cheaper at release already. Fast forward 25 years, salaries are the same and hardware costs… double? The math doesn’t work out
Where are salaries the same? With your jlai.lu domain I would’ve thought you’re French, in which case they haven’t really doubled since France was already a well-off western nation, but close enough
(using 2001 as the starting point since you did say fast forward 25 years)
Now in a country like mine, things are different. From 300-400 EUR per month average in 2001 (minimum being even lower), to over 2000 in 2025 (pre-tax numbers here, the French ones in the graph are post-tax). The new generation consoles are far more affordable even with their current price hike because you don’t have to save up for years to buy one and then save up several months to buy a single game.
PS5 was too much day one at £400 and it’s only gone up since. What happened to the days of sub-£200 consoles later in their lifespan?
AI datacenters and greed.
I think the problem might sort itself out once the data centers are actually built. The impact from maintaining a data center is probably less than from actually building one.
If they allowed to build all the data centers around me, hardware be less of our issues. We want have any water left in our homes. They literally trying to build 26 of these fucking water draining things in our area.
No it’s gonna suck. Those data centers will consume fresh water and power driving up costs of both over the long term.
The chips will also become obsolete or will degrade over time. After 7 years they will require replacement. Same is true with memory and ram.
It’s never going to end.
Increased demand translates to increased memory and ram production capacity?
In a world where inputs to the process of chip creation can scale you would be correct.
However it takes at least a decade to bring a power plant online restrict power generation. Access to natural gas and oil can be distrupted further restricting access to power. There is a finite supply of water in most areas that can not be expanded . Disruption to trade routes due to war and tariffs make expanding the inputs to production difficult. Reduces access to capital due to a lack of faith in the US government and rising interest rates will restrict that access.
The world of plenty we lived in was dying even before Covid killed it off. We live in a world of scarcity and disrupted supply and resources now.
We’re also losing the ability to shrink our transistors at this point, so the things that made old tech cheaper before don’t really apply anymore.
Hopefully at least competition can catch up. It would be great to have competitive manufacturing capacity here in the EU rather than depend on global trade (Looks at Unprecedented Event Of The Month)
Capitalism
Just gonna throw this out there; If you’ve never had a Nintendo Wii, I’d genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.
My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC since every newer console seemed far too expensive for the very few exclusives that interested me. The only console I didn’t have from that generation was the Wii, as I’d always written it off as a gimmick. But after taking a closer look at its library, it’s surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are a pretty unique way to interact with games.
I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even for a lot that included a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it was done, I was amazed to find that it has access to an online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.
That means the console has access to:
- The entire Wii library (Including modern light-gun style games, like Deadspace: Extraction, plus Wii fit with the balance board, which is actually really fun)
- All gamecube games with the Nintendont emulator (best paired with either a gamecube controller or the Wii Classic controller)
- Pretty much every retro console such as SNES, Genesis, GB, GBC, GBA, etc with emulators
- The highlights of the N64 and NeoGeo catalog thanks to being ported to the Virtual Console
All for less than $100. It’s an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas, and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I’ve ever owned, but I suspect I’ll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future.
Xbox Series S is also great for modding too. Wii U is nice for modding too IMO.
As somebody who manages a piece of software often used in wii modding: ye, do it! Mod a wii :p
But seriously, the ps3/wii/x360 era were the last gen where the hardware design was rather simple and easy to understand, making it fun to play with and learn. The wiiu ended up with a bootrom making it harder and way more complex to run your own stuff on it ( outside of wii-mode and non-system menu stuff ). Then the switch was a whole new level (and we got lucky there with the bootrom exploit).
Switch added secure bootrom, executable validation, firmware blobs, no-execute memory flags, dedicated crypto hardware in cpu with it’s own firmware, …
Even if you had raw access you still needed to implement some stuff just get hardware even going.
I guess it’s finally time to tackle my backlog.
Personally I don’t need better graphics, PS4/PS5 level is already great. Developers can do pretty much everything they can imagine.
I’m for cheaper, more accessible hardware.
I guess the bigger question that comes from this, is do I go with a Steamdeck or with a Legion 2?
A follow up would be, do I wait for the Steamdeck 2
If you’re looking into that, it might be worth considering some of the Android portable like the AYN Thor.
While they are usually focused on console emulation, on the more powerful units you can run older windows titles on them via emulation as well as any native android stuff you feel like running. The battery life of anything ARM beats the hell out of anything x86. There are also form factors available worlds better than the Legion or Steamdeck if you actually want something you can carry around in a pocket.
The aforementioned AYN Thor is about the size and form factor of a 3DS and retails for $250 for the cheapest model. So if you’re looking for something to tide you over until you can get a full gaming PC/Gabecube/Steamdeck 2, it might be better “half measure” than a Legion or Steamdeck.
I mean…those are not prices the market will pay so I guess rip console market?
