PS5 might be $500 at launch.

[Rumpy]

Oh yeah, rumors are now saying that Sony is also going to have a cheaper edition of the PS5, taking the same route that MS has been rumored to be doing. Odds are the top shelf of these is going to be $600.

[gamevet]

Crytek released a Ray Tracing demo using their latest Cry Engine. It doesn't require a powerful RTX graphics card to run. Also, AMD GPUs use asynchronous compute, which does handle that sort of workload better than a non-RTX Nvidia GPU.

You can see here that it's barely putting any stress on my i9 9900k, but it is taxing the GTX 1080 @ 1440p.

[Toupee]

$500 seems like a reasonable price, if not a steal, if it really performs as well as a PC with a raytracing card on the market today. A fast SSD, RAM, a good CPU... those components add up. Hell, I paid $500 for my GTX 1080 alone a couple years ago. (Also, that was crazy. Why did I do that? It's a good card though.) Same goes for the Series X. While I'm not expecting these systems to really outperform my now-modest system by a boatload, I am curious as to what developers might work on now that these could be seen as the target spec. Or maybe not, since they're probably going to be selling for the PS4/Xbox One as well. So... brand name exclusivity? Yay?

I do think a lot of things sound right with these systems, as far as backwards compatibility, finally embracing SSDs, and so on. Hopefully these will enable many more people to have nice fluid experiences. I just have a hard time shelling out for a system that is basically another version of the computer I already have for one or two games. PS4 to me feels like a $400 paywall so that I can play The Last Guardian. (I would have said Death Stranding, but it's coming out on PC! Ha! And... I can't think of that many PS4 exclusives I feel I've missed out on.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not PC Masturrr Race. I love the Switch. I've played more hours and more games on the Switch since it came out than anything else in the last decade, honestly. Because it really mixes up the game and offers new, novel experiences. It's genuinely useful to be able to play on my TV, yank it off the dock and go play on the bus. And a bunch of other reasons. It ain't perfect, but it's form factor and features makes it damn compelling.

I guess it's nostalgic but I miss the days when having different consoles really meant something, though. Now these just seem like locked-down PCs. Just - finally, very good locked-down PCs.

[Pineapple]

I'm nostalgic for those days as well, I made lasting friendships because we didn't have a Genesis and I wanted to play Sonic and MERCS and eventually Vectorman. And they would come over and play Mario and Tetris and Kung Fu. I didn't know anyone who had fun stuff like a Neo Geo or a Saturn, but I would have befriended them as well.

[James]

Beginning to think the launch of the new consoles is going to either miss the expected/assumed Fall rollout or be in such limited numbers they might as well not have bothered.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

that may work to their short term benefit.
Nothing gets "gamers" riled up for something than to think they can't have it right away.

[James]

True, but in this case there's the issue of not having enough consoles to make the software profitable. I'm not sure what the supply chains look like during prime console-manufacturing time, but I'm thinking it's going to start at "terrible" and only go downward from there.

[Dunlap]

Microsoft has been touting that any game that releases on both new and current hardware will automatically install the compatible version, so it doesn't even sound like they're going to have software that's exclusive to the new XBox. I think doing a limited hardware release around the holidays can be spun as a positive. Nintendo does it every generation.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

having software and no hardware to sell only fucks over the retailers, which is normal. So we counter that with forced bundles at best, stupid shit like Best Buy adding a $50 premium to the Wii because they updated the system for you at worst. (Anyone remember that bullshit?)

[Shin Johnpv]

Yeah I believe MS said there was going to be no exclusives for the new system for a bit. I would imagine most, if not all 3rd parties are going to be releasing their games on the new stuff and the old ones. PS5 exclusives are going to come down to whatever Sony has.