Weak Boson wrote:I'm inclined to agree. I never jumped on the current gen, and I probably won't bother with the next one. The logic of accruing a collection of different machines which encourage you to buy the same games over and over again doesn't hold up when you can just get a PC game and play it on your current hardware.
Of course, this is just as Marx predicted. The near zero marginal cost of reproducing video games collapses the supply/demand price mechanism which allowed the industry to grow in the first place. An increasingly large historical library of old games compete with new ones without needing to factor in the initial investment made in their production. Such a market is completely unsustainable and will collapse if it does not change. We already have the model for the alternative; rent seeking software with artificially closed-off and time-gated hardware. Apple were perhaps the the first on this wave, and indeed if I'm not mistaken all the CAVE ports to their platform are now unplayable. The music industry has already grappled with this but dealt with it in an overall more open manner, with free streaming services supplemented by a subscription model with additional benefits. I don't see the gaming industry going this way, but I do expect subscription-based models like Microsoft's game pass to become more standard. Of course DRM has long been a big issue for many PC players, but hopefully despite this PC gaming will continue to be relatively open.
Yeah, I think they're getting lucky right now that so many idiots are still buying so many remasters and remakes, but I think that bubble is going to burst pretty soon when the market gets so disgustingly saturated that there's not even any games left to remaster. It's already starting to get obvious that companies are running out of actual well-respected and highly-praised games to remaster and are just shitting out collections of anything they still own the rights to so they can capitalize on nostalgia while the iron is hot.
Curious to see where things go next year when the major new consoles release. We already know Microsoft is going 100% backwards compatible with all 3 previous generations of Xbox games and also keeping Game Pass, but Sony is only going 1 generation backwards for compatability, and PS Now is still a huge joke, so it doesn't look too good for them and they may try to rely more on remasters and remakes again.
Nintendo is pretty much the worst offender at the moment, with the amount of ports and remasters on the console being pretty close to around 75% or so of the entire software available for the console, way higher than the others. I'm scared to even see how bleak their output is going to be once they've shat out enough ports to make up for not even being a real contender in the last two console generations.
Apple's recent bullshit of locking out software that was developed for an older iOS version is one of the biggest jokes of them all, and that's why I've kept one of my old iPads around, so I can still play the software that I own for the platform. They could easily devote some effort and money to be able to make all these games work again, but they just aren't, and instead are leaving it up to the developers to do so, and no developer is going to invest in it either unless it's some kind of live service game that still has a steady stream of in-game purchase revenue to this day, so thousands upon thousands of these games will just be dead in the water unless you own an older device.
