The next generation of game consoles and my concerns
As you probably know soon the next generation of consoles will be upon us. I am excited but I also can't help but be concerned about the upcoming next generation particularly concerning PS5 and the next Xbox. The purported specs for the PS5 sound insane based on what I have read and there are rumors the next Xbox could be even more powerful than that. This is what brings me to my main concern which is the cost. Considering the rumors and reports that Sony is intending to push 8K tech with the PS5, I can't help but worry we could have another PS5 situation all over again. To those of you who are not really aware much of Sony's financial troubles can be traced back to the PS3 because the thing was so bloody expensive to manufacture that it pretty much ate up all of Sony's PS1 and PS2 profits combined and it only just barely turned a profit due to the onset of the great recession.Â
The biggest issue I see is that Sony is trying to push a technology that currently doesn't exist at least in a consumer friendly form not to mention 4K has yet to achieve true mainstream adoption. 4K in it’s current state is still relatively limited as far as mainstream cable and satellite TV is concerned right now being mainly limited to on demand movies, pay per view sports, and a select handful of premium channels. While streaming services such as Netflix do offer 4K content, the speed of most North American internet connections usually results in the picture quality being not much greater than your typical 1080p Blu Ray which brings me to the other thing with 4K in that you need a fairly large TV to really make out any difference from 1080p.
I am still unsure excactly if the PS5 will rely solely on SSDs for it’s storage or use an SSD HDD combo like what a lot of PCs these days often use. I hope it’s the latter because there is no way in hell I can see this thing using SSDs exclusively and not ending up with a relatively hefty price tag considering how large capacity SSDs are still much more expensive compared to standard hard drives.
Then there is the matter of ray tracing. While Ray Tracing has been commonly employed in film and television in those cases it has typically been done with large server farms and cloud computing. I suspect by the time the next consoles come out we might start seeing GPUs that support Ray Tracing natively start to enter the market but don’t expect them to be cheap. If Sony really plans to put such a GPU in the PS5 I can only imagine the potential cost.
I can't help but feel that Sony and Microsoft's emphasis on bleeding edge tech could come back to haunt them big time as there is currently a very high likelihood that video games will become even more expensive thanks to a certain president's trade war with China which is where a lot of electronics manufacturing is handled game consoles included.
