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The gaming industry is already beginning to move away from big, expensive machines to cloud gaming, where gaming occurs online. Image: Nastco / IStock.com via AFP Relaxnews
The upcoming release of the 9th generation game consoles from Sony and Microsoft will become a sales hit for consumers seeking entertainment during pandemic lockdown, but could it also be their swan song as game habits change? players?
Both companies have been leaking information for months about the PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X to build buzz, and have now announced that the consoles will hit shelves and living rooms in mid-November.
Pre-orders for the PS5 sold out quickly at various retailers, showing that many players are eager to upgrade and set up a sales battle just in time for the holiday season.
And it will be a major upgrade in terms of hardware, as the current generation of machines launched in 2013. Both new consoles will offer much more powerful core processors and graphics, support 4K TVs, and offer ray tracing. allowing a better interpretation of how the light behaves. All this will make the game more fluid and vivid.
“When you look at the technical specifications of the new consoles, there are 10 times more than the current generation. We are going to have more beautiful, more realistic, more immersive games. People are going to be amazed, ”said Charles-Louis Planade, a video game expert at Midcap Partners.
Dark cloud in the sky?
Sony has the 110 million PS4 consoles it has sold in the last seven years as an indicator of success, more than double that of its competitor Xbox One.
“For Microsoft, the challenge is not to let Sony get too far ahead, maybe even the game,” Planade told AFP.
Given the growing number of players, the analyst believes they may be able to match their previous success.
Others are not so sure given the changes in the industry, which is already beginning to shift away from big, expensive machines to cloud gaming, where gambling occurs online.
“This generation could be the last physical console. It will be the last time we hear about teraflops, ”said Audrey Leprince, co-founder of independent game studio The Game Bakers.
A teraflop refers to the ability of a processor to calculate a trillion operations, and both Sony and Microsoft have been bragging about the speed and power of their new consoles.
Leprince said there have been no major innovations with the game’s interfaces or with the games themselves.
But “the stone in the pond … is the switch to the subscription model,” which means that console makers are turning into a “Netflix of video games,” he said.
The subscriptions – Game Pass for Microsoft and PlayStation Plus for Sony “are going to completely revolutionize the industry as was the case with movies and music,” Leprince said.
The Game Pass already works much like Netflix for video games by offering access to a catalog of titles, while PlayStation Plus offers other services that are attractive to gamers, such as playing online with friends.
“The challenge for console manufacturers is to retain their subscribers so as not to accommodate rivals” such as Google or Amazon, Planade said.
Cloud games
The two web giants are betting on cloud gaming, allowing them to do without consoles. Games can run on a variety of devices, such as smartphones and tablets. As it is the cloud servers that do the heavy lifting in terms of processing, there is no need for powerful and expensive consoles.
But both companies have also taken a step towards cloud gaming by offering lower-priced versions of their new unitless consoles. Games must be downloaded from the web or streamed, and they have dedicated xCloud and PlayStation Now services.
“We are in a transition phase,” said Laurent Michaud, an analyst who specializes in the video game industry, who hopes that consoles and cloud games will coexist for a time.
“Trends indicate that this will not be the last generation of consoles,” he believes.
Many gamers value playing on large, high-resolution screens, and publishers will want to take advantage of 8K televisions that offer a much better experience.
“Networks, even in a few years, will not be fast enough to carry” images for 8K displays, Michaud noted.
With “technology putting all manufacturers on the same level”, the game catalog “will be even more important than in the past for the success of this generation.”
It’s no coincidence that both Sony and Microsoft have lined up a number of long-awaited game titles to launch with consoles. IB
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