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Topic: Will the Wii's legacy be that of the last mainstream console? (Read 402 times)

donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1015
IMO, all these new electronic gadgets are coming out far too soon and too often. The old ones are just fine and the new ones aren't significantly better. They're also very expensive. It's really sad (even despicable) how quickly consumers are expected to just toss out their older possessions for the 'latest, greatest' POS.
I'm guessing it's a case of getting way more money out of far fewer users. Unsure how else continued console development could be explained unless they're really expecting to recapture former console glory days.

The rapid release cycle is probably contributing significantly toward developers being unable to take full-advantage of the hardware. Games don't really seem properly optimized, and the framerates in many latest-gen games is shockingly low. I remember playing... I think it was MGS4
(whatever one had the weird jiggling-boob Asian women... or I guess that's pretty much all of them) on PS4, and the FPS was regularly and noticeably low, which seemed so bizarre to me - and for a console to have stuttering video on a game made specifically for it and supposedly tested. I'm not really sure when "it usually doesn't stutter and plays above 15FPS more often than not" became acceptable for consoles. Meanwhile, if you looked at, say, Final Fantasy 7 vs Final Fantasy 9 for PSX, the tweaks and optimizations are really kind of shocking - that they were both made for the same system with the same specs. -Or you could look at early games for Amiga 1200 and then look at Payback, which is so well-rendered on such antiquated hardware, it's unbelievable.

Burning Rubber (1993, Amiga)

^Is that a compact station wagon?

Xtreme Racing (1995, Amiga)


Payback (2001, Amiga)


Final Fantasy 7 (1997, PSX)

^That tree shadow... I don't even (fun fact: FF7 was the most expensive game ever produced at the time)

Final Fantasy 9 (2000, PSX)
sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 500
I like boobies
IMO, all these new electronic gadgets are coming out far too soon and too often. The old ones are just fine and the new ones aren't significantly better. They're also very expensive. It's really sad (even despicable) how quickly consumers are expected to just toss out their older possessions for the 'latest, greatest' POS.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1015
While Xbox may've made news from companies executives resigning after abysmal Xbone sales (MS has managed to push out only a bit over 5M), the PS4 hasn't done too much better. Sure, Sony's sold over 3x as many units as the Xbone, but this is still just a little over a tenth of PS2 units sold, and a bit over a fifth of PS3s sold, while the PS4 is now nominally two years old.

The Wii was released in 2006 and remains the most recent console to ever sell more than 100M units (barely), never able to match the number of PSX units sold. Isn't it strange that against Moore's Law, the significant increase in population and discretionary spending, and how gaming is allegedly becoming more "mainstream" each year, consoles (both hand-held and static home units) have been fairly consistently underselling their counterparts of ~a decade ago?

Honestly, I can think of more than a few PSX and PS2 games which are far superior in my mind than the best the PS3, PS4, or Xbone have offered. Are consoles a dead market? Is there going to be a PS5 or Xbox.... Two?
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