Next generation hardware is a topic on many of our minds as of late, with the PS5 and Project Scarlett on the horizon from Sony and Microsoft, respectively. It’s easy to want to gobble up any semblance of information that appears, since excitement is high for most of us. But the head of Platinum Games, Atsushi Inaba does not share the same enthusiasm.
During a talk the Video Game Championships (VGC) at E3 2019, Inaba had a lot to say about the landscape of the next generation. He noted that the hardware is made up of “stuff that… already exists.” He also said the following in reference to the platform holders’ plan:
It’s OK. And by that I mean, I’m sure that things will move faster, graphics will be better and maybe it will be easier with less wait times… that’s good for the consumer.
But it’s more of the same, quite frankly, compared to previous generations. It’s nothing that’s disruptive or super innovative, if you ask me.
Game hardware used to be about custom chips that you couldn’t do on PCs. Now you look at it and they’re just grabbing stuff that already exists.
The Switch, for example, is a Tegra which already existed and the other consoles are using very similar chips and graphics cards to what you see on PCs, but maybe slightly updated. None of it seems unique to that hardware anymore.
It’s hard to get excited about stuff that kind of already exists, but has been repurposed to a certain degree.
Inaba, instead, praised Google for the innovation presented with its streaming service, Stadia, which will be launching later this year for early adopters.
Although we recently reported on a rumor about the power of the next generation PlayStation being higher than the next Xbox, not enough information is known about each system’s features. It’s too early to tell, of course, but evidently, Platinum’s boss doesn’t seem to be blown away at the idea of these new systems.
What do you think? Is power alone enough to entice you? Or are you looking for something new and innovative? Let us know!
[Source: Video Games Chronicle]
