Hard Sell

The muted reaction to Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro presentation left the impression that whatever people want, it’s not what Sony was leading with in their unveiling of their newest gaming hardware.

So what do they want? What do we want from a new piece of games hardware? That’s hard to say, and it’s not a surprise that the inherently incremental nature of a PS5 Pro felt like a misreading of the room. Rob and Patrick will probably take “the same, but better” if it’s offered, but if you ask them what would excite them, they have some very different answers along very different lines than a getting a slightly better video card.

Rob: So Patrick, it seems safe to say that the general reaction to the PS5 Pro was indifferent. Even in quarters where you might expect a bit more excitement around a $700 console with a better graphics card, Sony’s presentation didn’t effectively sell people on the idea that the Pro would deliver widespread, meaningful improvements and it doesn’t seem like anyone is really thirsting to buy an even more expensive video games console.

We’ve talked extensively about the fact that we are in an era of marginal gains for graphical performance in video games. It’s been a problem since the start of this generation, and was a problem with the latest generation of PC graphics cards as well (the fact that NVIDIA apparently left a chasm between its top-end 4090 card and the rest of the 40XX line did not help). Part of it is that there’s simply not a ton that really serves a dedicated showcase to the latest tech because most things are built to straddle a wide range of hardware specs, so you end up with the kinds of underwhelming examples that Sony used, where they were reduced to showing how marginal details in a game that already looked good are suddenly a bit sharper. The fact that poor old Joel and Ellie are dragged out of retirement for “one last job” every time Sony has a new hardware spec doesn’t do much to assuage that Groundhog Day feeling around these reveals.

I’m pretty sympathetic to the “make it look better just because you can” point-of-view, but while I can enjoy a flight of fancy where I spend $20,000 on a new setup to enjoy Gran Turismo 7 in 8K (but not with HDR, apparently!), there’s a difference between enjoying better graphics and actually wanting them.

I freely acknowledge that one reason we end up foregrounding graphics so much is because you can show screenshots and videos as part of a sales pitch, while just about any other improvement is something that has to be experienced firsthand to fully appreciate. But it seems clear that “more graphics” aren’t moving the needle anymore, and the industry is struggling to figure out what will.

Personally, I keep thinking about the wasted potential of the PS5 controller. This isn’t Sony’s fault: their first-party stuff makes good-to-great use of its adaptive triggers, if not necessarily the touchpad. But it’s one of the few things to come along in the last ten years that can make a profound difference in how it feels to play a game, and how much information the controller itself can impart to the player. There should be a slew of games making use of it, especially given how well that console sold, but outside of Sony it mostly gets treated like a clone of the Xbox controller. Think of how lively Astro’s Playroom feels in your hand, the way it underscored every game mechanic and let you literally feel like you had a better grasp of their controls. I tell you without a shred of exaggeration that adaptive triggers were transformative for GT7.  This should have been a bigger deal, if only to Sony. When you’re talking about how game controls feel, how good their feedback is, that’s a huge part of the equation. But we’re frequently stuck playing games with frankly numb-feeling controls because neither controller nor keyboard-and-mouse support is particularly well-implemented, a lowest-common denominator situation where at best we get passable, somewhat inoffensive controls. I think you could argue we have some of the best controller tech games have ever had, and games have rarely done a worse job of making players feel connected to the games they are controlling. The general shrug that greeted the PS5 controller’s unique features hints at an underlying problem: games are a tactile medium, but that tactility is treated as a minimum target developers have to hit rather than an opportunity to make a game feel better and more engaging. Frankly, you could keep the ray-tracing and maybe even the HDR if more games gave me the immediate sense of involvement that I got from that initial slate of PS5 games.

In a word, I’m a lot less moved by level of detail than I am by attention to detail, and I think that’s the stuff I want from games a hell of a lot more than I want a GPU that’s 67% bigger delivering 45% better performance.

What about you? What’s the stuff you want from a new piece of games hardware now? Not “what do you think would be commercially successful” but what is the thing that they could do that would meaningfully enrich your experience of the hardware or address a problem that sticks in your craw?

Patrick: What I want from video games these days is the ability to play them wherever, whenever at an acceptable quality. It’s the reason the Steam Deck is so central to my life, it’s the reason the Switch, before the Steam Deck, was my most played piece of gaming hardware. It’s why I’ve jumped through hoops to make my PC stream wirelessly to my TV in the family room. It’s why I wish my Apple TV had a native GeForce NOW app. Increasingly, I’m just asking for my games to meet me where I am, and allow me to play them when I have time for them.

In a way, you could argue this helps explain why things like the DualSense have been a flop, outside of a few experiments. One of Microsoft’s big pitches has been turning “every screen into an Xbox” through cloud gaming. Video game hardware has not just plateaued—it’s flattened. A game is a game is a game, and even Nintendo has ended up in a place where its central gimmick is not about a second screen, it’s about letting one screen meet you where you are.

In that sense, why would any developer put meaningful work into something that wasn’t portable? You can’t be sure where your game might be played, and that could be as simple as knowing you’re likely to have a PC port where you can’t guarantee what controller they’re using. 

I suspect the PlayStation 5 Pro is more impressive than Sony’s presentation revealed. Not because Sony was holding back, but because it was a piss poor event. It wasn’t able to appeal to normies or sickos, and yet, each time a clip trickles out of Digital Foundry, it has me going “hey, that looks pretty good.” Some of this is caught up in something we’ve been talking about for a minute now, the idea that gaming hardware has entered a phone phase where upgrades are incremental and largely unnecessary, but I think it also speaks to Sony being unsure where to hang their hat on. It’s a bit like the dance EA does with its sports games every year, where they have to quietly convince you their last game was ass without actually saying it. But you’re trying to instill FOMO. The question with the PlayStation 5 Pro is who you’re instilling fomo in.