Hi everybody, I’m a white man in a baseball cap wearing reflective sunglasses in his car recording a video, and I’m here to talk about something I think is really important, and that is the cost of video game hardware. The cost of the Xbox, the cost of the PlayStation, the cost of Nintendo—all have gone up in the last year. And now I’m hearing, because I listen to video game podcasts, about the cost of a PlayStation 6, or the cost of the next-generation Xbox, or where the Nintendo Switch is going to end up going in the future.
Like, you know, a lot of tech stuff has gone up in price, but here’s the thing: we don’t need a PlayStation 6. We haven’t even gotten a Naughty Dog game on PlayStation 5. I haven’t bought a PlayStation 5 yet because there have not been enough good games that come out that make me go, “Okay, I’m willing to spend 500 bucks or 600 or 700 or a thousand as it is now.” So why even bother releasing a PlayStation 6 if it’s going to be super expensive and they still haven’t done enough games for PlayStation 5?
Keep making the PlayStation 5, keep doing that. There’s no reason to go to six. Current Xbox: keep doing that. Whenever they do a generational shift, it makes games cost more, they have lower sales because the install base for the new system is lower. There’s still games coming out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. They don’t make the systems anymore, but there’s still games that come out for those systems because we don’t need the bleeding edge of hardware to make a great game anymore.
The most popular games available right now—Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite—these are all games that play on last-generation hardware. A game system that you could have gotten 10 years ago will still play those games, okay? Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out soon, that’s true, I know that’s going to be a very popular game. But also, a lot of people bought PlayStation 5s in the last six years that they’ve been available; a lot of people bought Xboxes in the last six years they’ve been available. A lot of people are going to buy those systems, and it’s going to be another decade and a half until a Grand Theft Auto 7 or something big like that comes out.
So why bother going to the next generation of game systems if we can’t even support the ones we have? We don’t need more power. I’m playing Gears of War E-Day right now and it’s one of the most beautiful games—well, “beautiful” is maybe a stretch because it’s gross and everything’s exploding all the time, but it is one of the most graphically intensive, well-made games I’ve played in a really long time. It is pure AAA video game in that way, and I don’t know that I need something more detailed than that. There’s no reason for us to go, and we definitely don’t need more enemies on screen—there’s already too many guys shooting at me at any given time.
We don’t need better game AI, we don’t need anything that’s higher resolution because 4K TVs are still it. A lot of hardcore gamers on PCs are running stuff at lower resolutions like 1080p or 2K in order to run the game at 120 frames per second. Yeah, that’s the other thing: they should be making games at lower resolutions or stuff that supports last-generation hardware (like PlayStation 4 era games) in order to make stuff run at a locked 60 or locked 120 or higher refresh rates.
It’s ridiculous to have games that are chugging at 30 frames per second or lower depending on what stuff comes on screen. Meanwhile, it looks great in a screenshot, but I need stuff to be snappier and move faster—that’s where the game becomes enjoyable. That’s why Fortnite is so big: because it can run on such old hardware that if you have newer hardware, it feels amazing and really snappy.
So anyway, this has been almost five minutes of me ranting about video games, and I don’t know what we need to do in order to change this. If you have ideas, if you could talk to somebody at Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo or wherever, we need to pump the brakes on the next generation. There’s no need to go up to a higher level of game system when we can barely support the ones we have. Game companies: do the work, work on the current consoles.
My name is Zac Shipley from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I’m a gamer.