Comment by wat10000
2 days ago
It seems like the days of revolutionary consumer electronics are over.
This looks nice, for sure. But it’s really more of the same. Not surprising. It does surprise me that there’s such emphasis on it, though. There’s the name, of course, and then the entire video is based around “it’s the same thing but a little better.”
Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. Now… PS5? What’s different from PS4, again? Is there a 6? What’s different about that?
I don’t blame Nintendo or the others. I have no idea what they could do here they would be revolutionary. I think the design space has just been thoroughly explored by now and that’s where we are.
This pattern repeats all over the place. TVs are maxed out, with better visual quality than people care about, and size limited by wall space. Computers get a little faster every year. This year’s phones are last year’s phones with a minor performance bump and slightly better cameras. And again, I don’t see what they can do better, and that’s probably how it has to be at this point.
But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”
> Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge.
There are two categories of "big deal". The SNES and PS2 were big deals simply because game graphics had so much headroom for improvement. Now that the low-hanging fruits of color palette, resolution, frame rate, texture quality, animation quality, and geometric complexity have all been squeezed, the improvements are more asymptotic.
The other "big deal" category is gimmicks. I would argue that while it is a hallmark of Nintendo, the gimmicks have flopped as often as not. Most of Nintendo's big sellers were fairly conventional. (The most glaring exceptions being the original Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch.) I'm glad they do the gimmicks, but I'm also glad they don't only do the gimmicks.
But those are three hells of exceptions (can you actually do that in English? I was trying to pluralize "a hell of an exception").
They are the 3rd, 4th and 7th best selling consoles of all time. And you forgot the dual screen in the DS (2nd best selling of all time).
Maybe many of the gimmicks flopped, but others wildly succeeded and Nintendo wouldn't be what it is without them. In fact, it probably wouldn't even make consoles by now, following the fate of Sega.
On your English question, “three hells of exceptions” sounds like something from Dante’s Inferno. It’s a nice phrase but not quite what you’re after.
I can’t think of how to make it work. That phrase might just be inherently singular. Too bad, plural would be useful.
Exactly. For a while you could have huge improvements from better hardware. Then there were some cool new gimmicks. Now both of those seem to be played out.
And that’s happening across the board. All the stuff I’d go ogle in Best Buy as a teenager is now basically maxed out both in terms of hardware and gimmicks.
>The SNES was a revolution
Nintendo has actually stated they view the SNES as a evolution of the NES. They have directly stated their hardware development cycle goes Revolution>Evolution>Revolution. Considering that the Switch was considered one of their revolutionary leap (their first hybrid console) it is no surprise the Switch 2 is a simple evolution of that concept. If their next console is another iteration of the Switch THEN it is safe to say they are no longer aiming to revolutionize their hardware.
Edit: After tons of searching I am starting to think that I am misremembering thing. I think this idea came about from the Wii's 'Revolution' code name and I Mandela Effected myself into think there was a interview we're either Miyamoto or Iwata talked about this being there philosophy when designing system.
That really sounds like something someone made up in marketing.
The Wii came about because an independent company pitched motion control technology to Nintendo and they liked it and licensed it. Not because of the 3d chess game of going from "evolutions" to "revolutions".
The Switch came about because it's less expensive to make software for a single hardware unit than a separate handheld and console and this became an issue as games got more expensive to make.
I’d be curious to know when they said that. It sounds like revisionist history to me.
Based on the switch launch video, the delta between the NES and SNES was much higher than Switch -> Switch 2.
Here’s an analogous snes ad, which spends most of its time showing off 3d and increased sprite counts:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eSBFw93V3Rg
At the time, at least, I don't recall seeing SNES as a "revolution". It had better graphics etc, but the form factor was the same, and games were broadly similar, so it was more of a luxury option.
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Sorry, tried to find the interview and failed. It would most like have come out around the Wii's release/development since it used the code name Revolution.
I apologize, I tried to find the interview were this was stated but unfortunately search engines are terrible now and no matter how hard I try I only get news about the Switch 2 or old stories about when the Wii has code named Revolution. Feel free to not take my word that this was actually stated.
> PS2 was huge
PS2 was literally just an iteration on the PS1. More powerful console, DVD instead of CD, and that was it. Nothing really new there.
Hell, the Switch 2 is more innovative than the PS2 was in terms of iteration on a previous console.
“More powerful” was enough to be a step change at the time. You’d get huge improvements in image quality, realism, and immersion.
Now, compare a new game with one from ten years ago. The new one looks a little better. Not much.
The graphics bump you'd see from next gen systems prior 2010 was massive. So big in fact that it would unlock new genres of games which weren't previously possible.
ps1 > ps2 was pretty huge too because I'd argue the ps2 marked the first generation of consoles where games could move away from pixelated cartoony characters and into photo-realistic graphics and just about pull it off.
Today you get better lighting and shadows, or slightly higher FPS which is nice, but it doesn't really change the types of games you can make in the way the ps2 did.
PS1 launched without analog controls. This was later available as a newer controller for PS1, but if we count that as a PS2 base feature it's a nice innovation on PS1 at launch.
> More powerful console, DVD instead of CD, and that was it
Wrong. PS2 had pressure sensitive buttons, hard drives/linux, network multiplayer, camera, etc..
This all comes down to what the hardware improvements can mean in practice. It's not as if hardware isn't moving up, but that the new kinds of things double the hardware unlocks are much smaller than they used to be.
This is best seen on the PC market. What a gaming desktop today has running on it is, compute wise, unimaginably stronger than the best available 10-20 years ago. The increases in hardware just keep coming. But there's limits on how much more you can get out of being able to push more polygons, or to put more pixels on screen. We can do all kinds of extra photorealistic things in real time that before would have to be done only in movies, and rendered in server farms for weeks at a time. But the increased difficulty doesn't quite match how impressive the extra effects are.
You can also notice this by just playing old games, and seeing how they hold up. We can make 2d pixel art games that are much better than what a SNES could do, but many of those games still hold up just fine. Meanwhile most 3d games of the Playstation and even the PS2 era are downright painful, because the increases in power between generations back then lead to big practical differences in capability. A ps5 is much stronger than a ps4, hardware wise, but it didn't unlock much at all. All the extra power can get you cooler reflections on cyberpunk, and you can go even further with a PC that has over $1000 in video cards in it. But those reflections and atmospheric effects are eating up as much hardware as the rest of the game.
It’s some of each. Hardware is improving substantially slower than it used to. And at the same time, what you get out of better hardware has hit steeply diminishing returns.
> But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”
It's certainly more 'shocking' to see Nintendo do it than, say, Microsoft or Sony. But Nintendo hasn't always introduced huge new changes with a console bump — NES->SNES wasn't particularly revolutionary, and there were certainly no gimmicks there. I think it's a very understandable reaction to a) the Wii U b) the enormous success of the Switch
NES->SNES didn’t do much with the form factor or the controls, but technologically it was an enormous leap. That’s the sort of thing that just can’t happen anymore, since video game technology is pretty much maxed out. You can always make things a little bit prettier, or have a little better framerate, but nothing too interesting.
I suppose VR/AR is the one area where something big could still happen. The current state of the art there is far from the “mostly limited by the size of your wall” stage.
I feel like VR would have “happened with the masses” by now given that the quest is wireless, excellent quality, and cheap. Personally I think it did, and it’s a success, it’s just that it has a lower ceiling because it’s an awkward rectangle that you strap to your face.
There is also, IMO, a huge software quality problem with VR.
I am baffled as to why all the first person games don’t copy Alyx’s control scheme, it’s the only one that feels correct to use. The rest of the first person games feel awful to play, once you get past the gimmick of “wow cool”.
Music/rhythm games work really well for VR, but that’s always going to be a niche market. I play beat saber all the time, it’s fantastic.
Everything else seems to be sandbox games. Fucking sandbox games. They’re funny the first time, but you can only throw objects so many times before the magic is lost, you just wish there was an actual game there to play.
I love VR, and I hope developers continue to innovate with it, but it’s never going to overtake console gaming, it’s just too different.
I don’t get why we think AR is going to be any different for games. Why would I want to see my living room while playing a game? VR puts you in whole other worlds. It’s… that simple, I think.
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VR and, at some point, 3D.
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The Super Nintendo had totally new controllers and was top-loading. The UX was substantially different than the original Nintendo's VCR-style design.
Those are very minor 'gimmicks' compared to handheld, touch control, motion control, or hybrid.
The Famicom was top loading, too.
NES was only side loading because in the US Nintendo was trying to distance itself from the consoles that came before.
They did release a top-loading NES as well, although it came out after the SNES.
Hold up, what's the "revolution" between the PS1 and PS2? More processing power?
You could argue that no consoles in the Xbox or Playstation line are revolutionary, as they're the same format as the original SNES just with more buttons and processing power.
I would say the major shifts in controller type is simply a much rarer change than simple spec upgrades.
A lot more processing power, at a time where that made a huge difference in the graphics.
I've found more incredible improvements in AI than in consumer electronics these days. I'm still daily surprised at just how good ChatGPT is at understanding my pretty complex queries.
Maybe that will be the next big thing in games. Finally deliver on the promise of living, breathing worlds, instead of breaking the illusion when the character scripts start to repeat and you realize “your choices matter” means you can pick from one of three different endings.
I think this is it. Once a console can run an LLM you will see open world games with immersion that we’ve never seen before
Procedurally generated worlds are one thing but imagine exploring an endless world where you can talk to every NPC and never have the same conversation twice
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