The stage is all set for the next generation of consoles. Sony dropped more information on its upcoming PS5 months ago, while Microsoft shared more details with Project Scarlett during E3 last week, complete with a fancy trailer. Most of the people surrounding both devices are hyping them up to incredible degrees, with pundits on both side stating that theirs is more powerful than the other one.
While most of the console audience sit around and bathe in this excitement, there is at least one notable figure who isn’t that excited with this next generation, and it didn’t surprise me at all who he was.
In an interview with Videogameschronicle, PlatinumGames studio head Atsushi Inaba stated that he finds it “hard to get excited” about both Sony and Microsoft’s plans for the next generation of consoles, feeling that the upcoming hardware and innovations they will bring to the table are more of the same.
When asked what his reactions to the platforms are, Inaba said, “It’s OK. And by that I mean, I’m sure that things will move faster, graphics will be better and maybe it will be easier with less wait times… that’s good for the consumer.”
“But it’s more of the same, quite frankly, compared to previous generations. It’s nothing that’s disruptive or super innovative, if you ask me," Inaba added. "Game hardware used to be about custom chips that you couldn’t do on PCs. Now you look at it and they’re just grabbing stuff that already exists.”
Inaba then pointed out the Switch as an example, whose Tegra SoC already existed beforehand, as well as both existing Sony and Microsoft consoles using chips and GPUs already similar to PCs. “None of it seems unique to that hardware anymore,” Inaba said.
While I would tend to gravitate towards agreeing with Inaba’s stance, it’s clear that we’ve finally reached a point where computer technology has advanced to where we can have super high-end graphics on PCs. Consoles are trying to move down that path as well, to just try and improve the graphics and performance of games, which, while not really as innovative as the shift from 2D to 3D, is still a thing to be happy about. If you’re gaming on a console, that is.
It’s certainly weird enough to see SSDs just arriving now on the next-gen consoles in order to decrease load times, when the technology has been around for years. At the same time, both Sony and Microsoft opted into focusing on higher resolutions first (4K), rather than better frame rates (60 fps).
In any case, it will be interesting to see what this next generation of consoles has to offer us, besides the obvious graphical and performance upgrades, of course.
