Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.
“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”
This surprised me because it seems very obvious, but it’s still not often said by games industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancement to drum up investment and hype. If we’re now freely admitting that we’ve gone as far we sensibly can with console power, that does represent a major step-change in how the games industry does business.
I also found Layden’s statements quite validating, because I simply do not care about tech specs. I am the least technically minded games journalist I know, and have often felt as if I was in the minority. I would struggle to reliably tell the difference between 50fps and 60fps, or between 4k and 8k resolution, or to explain what ray tracing actually is. To me, games started looking pretty great about 15 years ago and most of the improvement I’ve seen since then has felt incremental. Developers have been innovating constantly during that time, but most of that innovation has been about themes and content rather than technical advances.
Technical specifications used to matter immensely to gamers. I vividly remember playground arguments over which was more powerful between the SNES and the Mega Drive, and internet forum arguments over whether the PlayStation 3 had an edge over the Xbox 360. For me, the end of this era began when Nintendo released the Wii, a relatively underpowered console that sold 100m, beat all of its rivals in sales and proved there are millions of players out there who just want to have fun at a reasonable price. Even 10 years after that, when the Switch was announced, it was mocked for being less powerful than the PS4 or Xbox One, which had both been out for years by that point. It has now sold 140m units.
Despite the provable reality that most players these days don’t care enough about tech specs to base their purchasing decisions on them, there are still millions of people who do care: these are the customers for whom the upcoming £700 PlayStation 5 Pro exists, for whom Digital Foundry’s exhaustively detailed analyses of games’ technical performance are written. It is, from anecdotal experience, quite probably the category to which most game developers belong. But I would argue that this is now a smallish subsection of the total player population.
What changed? The gaming audience has certainly shifted and expanded, but also, it’s a matter of diminishing returns. New consoles and new technological advances used to represent whole new possibilities for video games every few years: think of the difference between the first Super Mario Bros in 1985 and Super Mario 64 just 11 years later, or the difference between the first Grand Theft Auto and GTA: San Andreas. But something as momentous as the leap from 2D to 3D gaming in the late 90s? It’s been a long time since anything like that happened. The chief technological innovation of the last 15 years in games has been VR, and that turned out to have niche appeal.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been blown away by some of the stuff I’ve seen on the PlayStation 5. The visual detail of games like God of War: Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West is astounding. It’s the PS5’s speed and power that let Insomniac run wild on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and put those incredible dimension-shifting portals into Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. But most of this, though extremely neat, is also inessential. If it’s coming at the cost of studios’ ability to operate sustainably – and therefore at the cost of developers’ livelihoods – is continually escalating visual fidelity actually worth it? Is it time to leave that fight behind?
Nintendo already has. Indeed, its late president Satoru Iwata saw this coming way back in 2004. “Games have come to a dead end,” he told Japanese outlet Mainichi Interactive in 2004. “Creating complicated games with advanced graphics used to be the golden principle that led to success, but it is no longer working … The situation right now is that even if the developers work a hundred times harder, they can forget about selling a hundred times more units, since it’s difficult for them to even reach the status quo. It’s obvious that there’s no future to gaming if we continue to run on this principle that wastes time and energy.”
Xbox also appears to be thinking about throwing in the towel on the console wars. Though its executives have said that a shiny new Xbox console is in the works, Microsoft seems much more interested in getting its Game Pass subscription on to as many different devices as possible, rather than focusing on new hardware. Perhaps PlayStation will soon be the only one left in the technological arms race – and that could come at a huge cost.
What to play
Wilmot is a smiling white cube, and he is very good at arranging things. After his day job in a warehouse, he likes to unwind at home by doing jigsaw puzzles and then hanging them up on the wall.
Wilmot Works It Out is a soothing puzzle game elevated by lovely art from Richard Hogg (Flock, Hohokum) – every time the postie knocked at the door with a new package of puzzle pieces, there would be a few leftovers that eventually transformed into something unexpected, like a snake-playing guitar or a hotdog-clutching octopus. Relaxing and minimalist, this is a good lunchtime play on Steam Deck.
Available on: PC, Mac
Estimated playtime: 3 hours
What to read
2K has announced a new hero shooter game from Call of Duty veterans at studio 31st Unions. It’s called Project Ethos and given what recently happened to Sony’s hero shooter Concord, I shall be watching it with interest.
Analogue, maker of high-end modern retro consoles that let you play your old games optimally on modern TVs, has announced its take on the Nintendo 64, the Analogue 3D. It will play four-player GoldenEye at upscaled resolution, with Analogue’s trademark attention to detail in recreating the look and feel of the CRT TV era. Pre-orders are open now.
Deadline reports that the God of War TV adaptation from Sony and Amazon has hit a rough patch. They’re starting over on the project after several key staff departed.
Good news for fans of print video games journalism: the EGM compendium, a book compiled from decades’ worth of issues of the recently cancelled US magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, is 900% funded on Kickstarter.
What to click
Neva – sublime portrait of a warrior and her wolf in a dying world | ★★★★★
Fear the Spotlight – engrossing, eerie and unexpectedly thought-provoking horror | ★★★★★
The Rubber-Keyed Wonder: The Story of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum – glory and geekery | ★★★☆☆
‘I am valued here’: the extraordinary film that recreates a disabled boy’s rich digital life
Question Block
This week’s question comes from reader Phil:
“This lunchtime my copy of On arrived, ironically alongside the final ever issue of PLAY magazine, which I had no idea was closing. I am genuinely sad to see it go, as I was with gamesTM a few years ago. It seems inevitable that the day will come when we have no choice but to head to the internet for gaming news and reviews, so could you please recommend some websites to check out? With decent quality writing and sans any dismal toxic nonsense?”
My first ever job was as a junior staff writer on gamesTM magazine, and I have an enduring fondness for print – though media capitalism has ensured that most magazines now are shadows of their former selves, with skeleton staffs and lower page counts. (Hooray for the new wave of high-production-quality gaming periodicals!)
For someone with print sensibilities, my non-overwhelming games website recommendations are: VGC, a news-focused site run and staffed by people who worked on magazines for ages; Eurogamer, a long-running British website that still makes room for long-form criticism; PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun if you’re a PC guy; and Polygon, for me, is the best of the US-based sites. Also, I hear the Guardian has a very good online games section – you should check it out some time.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
