Will the PS5 be more like the Switch than the PS4?

[skywake]

Watching the WAN show and I notice that @LinusTech said that the Switch is an exception to the rule in terms of portables because it's also a home console. That's the conventional wisdom around portables, portables are dead because of phones and tablets. And given that's the undisputed truth the Switch must be doing well despite that because it's also a home console. Simple. But what if it's the other way around? We've already seen tablets and phones chew away at the use-cases for a PC for the every-day, casual user. What if the Switch form-factor does the same for gaming?

Here's a thought I've been having for a while now. Consoles have increasingly moved further and further away from the bleeding edge and games have increasingly become less demanding. A couple of decades ago a new console would launch and it'd be able to push better visuals than your PC. More than that developers would really push that hardware to its limits simply because they had to. Sure as PC gamers we can still mock 1080p/60fps but how much does the average console gamer really care? At what point do they give up on having the most powerful console ever and just go for one that is "good enough"? Because lets be honest, if they cared about specs above everything else they wouldn't be console gamers. Convenience and ease of use matters more to a console gamer than specs do.

 

And then on the other side we have mobile hardware. In about four years we've seen mobile chips like the Tegra go from something near the Wii spec on the Ouya to something sitting comfortably above the Wii U's spec when under-clocked on the Switch. Is it bleeding edge? Well no, but compared to a few years ago the spec is kinda crazy for a mobile device. The Switch's other big weakness as of now is storage but even there flash is increasingly getting cheaper. How long before flash, the only option for portables, is more cost effective per GB/console than HDDs and optical media? If they can sacrifice a little bit of horsepower and nothing else and make the system portable then why wouldn't they.

 

So imagine in 5 years time you're a console gamer and you have these two options:

1. A traditional home console with specs that can do 4K at 60fps without too much trouble (think 1080Ti)

2. A portable system along the lines of the Switch with specs that have no trouble with 1080p and can kinda fake 4K (think PS4 Pro)

Are console gamers really going to go for option 1?

[PlayStation 2]

I doubt Sony would be smart enough to go for a mobile system not unlike the Switch.

See: PS Vita, surprising console with a premise that Sony threw away

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, skywake said:

 

The PS5 and Xbone 2 are likely going to be home consoles with Raven Ridge APUs, highly doubt they'll be going portable. They're still successful despite PC being sooo much better overall.

Way back when console's could compete because the PC's didn't really have GPUs, they weren't good at doing what the consoles could do, and they were usually far more expensive. Although the consoles still lacked things the PCs could do like run DOOM.

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I doubt Sony would be smart enough to go for a mobile system not unlike the Switch.

See: PS Vita, surprising console with a premise that Sony threw away

The Vita likely failed because it couldn't be hacked like the PSP. Not sure if it has a micro SD adapter either. Also phones have really replaced the need for a dedicated portable console. Nintendo wouldn't need the 3DS if they just produced an android phone and their own store on the platform.

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, Streetguru said:

The Vita likely failed because it couldn't be hacked like the PSP. Not sure if it has a micro SD adapter either.

I doubt that was the main reason.

Unlike the PSP, Sony never bothered trying to advertise the Vita properly. It has good games for sure but not a lot of games.

Basically it failed not unlike the Wii U, but for slightly different reasons.

[Streetguru]

Just now, Dan Castellaneta said:

 

Edited in a ton.

[Himommies]

1 minute ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

 

Basically it failed not unlike the Wii U, but for slightly different reasons.

I'd say pretty much for the same reasons.A lackluster series of launch titles and and the price

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, Streetguru said:

Edited in a ton.

 

2 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

The Vita likely failed because it couldn't be hacked like the PSP. Not sure if it has a micro SD adapter either. Also phones have really replaced the need for a dedicated portable console. Nintendo wouldn't need the 3DS if they just produced an android phone and their own store on the platform.

I don't necessarily think the Vita failed because of phones. The 3DS maintained decent steady sales well into the advancement of smartphones throughout 2012-2016.

The Vita didn't have a Micro SD card adapter. Sony decided to fuck everyone entirely by using some proprietary format.

[Streetguru]

Just now, Dan Castellaneta said:

 

I don't necessarily think the Vita failed because of phones. The 3DS maintained decent steady sales well into the advancement of smartphones throughout 2012-2016.

The Vita didn't have a Micro SD card adapter. Sony decided to fuck everyone entirely by using some proprietary format.

A big part of the PSP was a big part of the OG Xbox, easy to hack and put emulators on.

Phones do lack hardware controllers though, if the Vita could be easily hacked and had emulators ported it, as soon as it had some price drops people would have bought the hardware at least. though unlike the PSP days everyone has a device with a solid display/compute for emulation, and there are better bluetooth controllers now as well.

The 3DS is likely successful because of the quality of games on it.

[skywake]

To be fair I think the Vita is a vastly different proposition to gamers than the Switch is. Not just because you can plug the Switch into the TV but because of the gap in what the hardware could do. As it has always been for portables. If you got a Vita you knew you weren't going to be playing PS4 games or even PS3 games on it. It was for the most part a standard-definition spec console with an entirely different set of games plus a few cross-platform indies.

 

The Switch is more along the lines of "You want to play Doom on the PS4? Well here's literally the same game on the Switch running at 720p/30fps". And sure now that's a pretty massive downgrade in performance. But when the next generation of systems come out? The gap in performance, even if it's a similar scale, probably won't mean as much.

[Kobathor]

I still think the 3DS is competitive in the mobile market. I think a dedicated mobile gaming platform still has a place. Not wasting the battery on phone functions, optimized because the developers don't have to fight for resources, and (on the 3DS) you can just close it and instantly pause any single-player game. I think the Vita failed due to the lack of popular games.