Since this will be my last piece of writing as Entertainment Editor for the Pony Express, I thought it would be fitting for it to be a final snapshot of the video game industry in the midst of COVID-19. 2020 saw relatively few game delays since games releasing that year had already been worked on for a long time, so these next few will be the years most significantly affected by the pandemic in terms of the number of releases.
With the next generation consoles still being hard to find and newer PC components being stuck behind shortages, the immediate future of the industry is looking pretty bleak. Sony’s new game Returnal has quickly become a PS5 system seller, and with so few available units, very few are able to even try the game. This issue could pressure developers to focus their resources on getting their more ambitious games next generation to work on older hardware. Even though both Sony and Microsoft released more powerful console revisions in 2017, all 6th generation games have to work even on the base consoles. The worst case scenario in this line of thinking has already come and gone, with the long awaited Cyberpunk 2077 being nearly unplayable upon release due to higher ups deeming the necessity of the game launching on PS4 and Xbox One. While it was still enjoyable to many on PC, the atrocious amount of glitches and lack of polish are almost certainly a symptom of this focus on last generation systems.
Despite the rule of diminishing returns with visual fidelity between console generations, this generational transition seems more important than the last. Games that launched during the early days of the PS4 and Xbox One still had options to play on PS3 and Xbox 360, with the visual upgrade between systems usually being little more than a slightly higher resolution. If a developer was making a game for PS4 and then decided they wanted it to launch on PS3 as well, they would usually just see a performance drop, whereas a similar situation with this generation would cause many more problems due to the freedom that Solid State Drives give to developers. Map sizes would most likely have to be cut depending on the game, with buffer zones in between to allow time for loading, among many other issues. Cross generational titles are definitely still viable if they’re started as such, but if Sony and Microsoft can’t increase production enough to get these consoles into more houses soon, more games that were planned as next generation exclusives have the chance to become another Cyberpunk fiasco. Hardware from 2013 that was already outdated in 2013 can’t carry the gaming population for much longer.
Despite the troubling image of the future this depicts, the industry will be fine in a handful of years, and in the meantime, games like Resident Evil Village and Spider-Man: Miles Morales continue to nail the cross generation model. We’ll know in June if there’s any big games to look forward to this year, but the industry will survive and eventually thrive regardless.
With the next generation consoles still being hard to find and newer PC components being stuck behind shortages, the immediate future of the industry is looking pretty bleak. Sony’s new game Returnal has quickly become a PS5 system seller, and with so few available units, very few are able to even try the game. This issue could pressure developers to focus their resources on getting their more ambitious games next generation to work on older hardware. Even though both Sony and Microsoft released more powerful console revisions in 2017, all 6th generation games have to work even on the base consoles. The worst case scenario in this line of thinking has already come and gone, with the long awaited Cyberpunk 2077 being nearly unplayable upon release due to higher ups deeming the necessity of the game launching on PS4 and Xbox One. While it was still enjoyable to many on PC, the atrocious amount of glitches and lack of polish are almost certainly a symptom of this focus on last generation systems.
Despite the rule of diminishing returns with visual fidelity between console generations, this generational transition seems more important than the last. Games that launched during the early days of the PS4 and Xbox One still had options to play on PS3 and Xbox 360, with the visual upgrade between systems usually being little more than a slightly higher resolution. If a developer was making a game for PS4 and then decided they wanted it to launch on PS3 as well, they would usually just see a performance drop, whereas a similar situation with this generation would cause many more problems due to the freedom that Solid State Drives give to developers. Map sizes would most likely have to be cut depending on the game, with buffer zones in between to allow time for loading, among many other issues. Cross generational titles are definitely still viable if they’re started as such, but if Sony and Microsoft can’t increase production enough to get these consoles into more houses soon, more games that were planned as next generation exclusives have the chance to become another Cyberpunk fiasco. Hardware from 2013 that was already outdated in 2013 can’t carry the gaming population for much longer.
Despite the troubling image of the future this depicts, the industry will be fine in a handful of years, and in the meantime, games like Resident Evil Village and Spider-Man: Miles Morales continue to nail the cross generation model. We’ll know in June if there’s any big games to look forward to this year, but the industry will survive and eventually thrive regardless.