Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Don’t Impress Us Any More [Op-Ed]
The Xbox One and Playstation 4 don’t impress us any more.
This console war has hardly seen the heated arguments of previous generations, and it’s mostly because the new machines are simply giving us what we expect now. After the Xbox 360 and PS3, we just started expecting more from the next generation, and now the next generation is giving us more, but we’re just not seeing anything really new.
Yes, there are a myriad of gamers out there who still vehemently defend their console choice even in light of certain deal-breaking details that reared their ugly heads later on, but it’s nowhere near the level of ferocity that previous generations have seen.
Every new generation gives us better graphics, more entertainment freedom, a bigger hard drive, etc., and it’s just gotten too predictable. With Nintendo struggling to stay afloat now, and a rough economy, the gaming industry has fallen into the category of “I want it, but not right now,” and the general lack of console war ferocity has shown us this general “meh” approach to the next round.
Xbox One is trying to wow us as an all-inclusive entertainment center, but the higher price makes us hesitant to upgrade from the Xbox 360 and all of the games we already own. PlayStation 4 is trying to go the budget route, but it appears Sony is seeing a much lower profit margin as a result of the comparative value of the US dollar and the Yen, and the budget route could possibly backfire for them.
A lot more gamers are probably going to wait and see this time around, as those of us who have been through console launches before know that the games are what make the console, not how powerful it is. Some of us even remember the joke from the launch of the PS3, where retailers could easily just stick a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 housing and nobody would notice the difference, because the console was launched without a good selection of games from the start.
In general, we’ve seen it all before. The excitement is still there, but it’s fizzled this time around. People just aren’t as excited about the Xbox One or PlayStation 4.
