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barbanonfacitvirum t1_iwogt9l wrote

Personally, I disagree. I wholeheartedly believe that the shortening of life cycles in order to render previous generations obsolete sooner and sell more consoles and more software over and over again across different iterations of the same console is a terrible practice and entirely anti-consumer. The PS4 is certainly getting a bit old, but in the grand scheme of things it could still go for at least several more years without its support window being unusual, let alone excessive.

I looked a few things up just to help contextualize this conversation:

NES was supported for 12 years;

Sega Master System was supported for 9 years, or even still currently depending on which region you look at;

TurboGrafx16 was supported for 7 years;

SNES was supported for 13 years;

Sega Genesis was supported for 11 years;

NeoGeo was supported for 14 years;

N64 was supported for 6 years;

GameCube was supported for 6 years;

PlayStation was supported for 12 years;

XBox was supported for 5 years;

PlayStation 2 was supported for 13 years;

XBox360 was supported for 11 years;

Wii was supported for 7 years;

PlayStation 3 was supported for 11 years;

Wii U was supported for 5 years;

Switch is currently at 5 years;

Xbox One is currently at 9 years;

PlayStation 4 is currently at 9 years.

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n1keym1key t1_iwq5tt9 wrote

Those older consoles were mainly only supported after a new gen was released by a few third party companies.

I agree with the OP, when a new console is launched after a year or so its time for the older one to be left behind. If third party devs want to continue supporting it then that fair enough but the console manufacturer should move on to support the new one only.

The problem we have currently is that new games are still being heavily pushed by both Sony and MS on the OLDER machines. Once they allow the older machines to become legacy devices and stop making devs release the game on both gens then we will finally see some true next gen games.

It never happened back in the day because the next gen was always a major jump in tech, this time around the next gen is really just a beefed up last gen.

We had new games being released on PS2 and the same game being released on PS1, the consoles were so wildly different inside that the 2 versions would have been developed using two completely different devs/publishers and we would get a version of the game that was suited to each console and used it to its ability.

The PS4 and Xbone need to die (a horrible death) before we see the true potential of the next gen machines.

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barbanonfacitvirum t1_iwqbvi4 wrote

My point was more that they're releasing consoles too frequently now.

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n1keym1key t1_iwqn8er wrote

No, tech moves faster now than it did in the old days, that's the reason for shorter lifespans, that and the fact that nowadays everyone wants the next big thing as soon as they have got their hands on the current big thing.

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barbanonfacitvirum t1_iwqnx43 wrote

You're kind of making my point for me. It isn't that I don't understand what is happening, it's that I think it is a bad thing. Shorter lifespans for equipment that costs roughly the same (with inflation taken into account) means that if something lasts half as long and costs the same amount, over a comparable period of time it costs the consumer twice as much money. I don't see how this sort of exploitation could be viewed as defensible, but if you're fine with it that's cool.

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n1keym1key t1_iwrrkrp wrote

Its the same with all tech though. Take TV's for instance. Back in the 90's I could go buy a Sony TV and know it was going to last for years and years barring any accidents and it wouldn't cost me £3k. TV's today just are not designed to last that long and they cost more too.

Many of those 90's/Early 00's CRT tv's are still going strong today and used by many in the retro gaming community. We won't be saying that about the flatscreens of today in 20+ years time.

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Big-Golf4266 OP t1_iwojvm3 wrote

this heavily dpeends on what you're considering "supported" as im mainly arguing for a transition of games no longer being released or heavily updated for the current console, which definitely hasnt been the case for 13 years on the xbox 360, the xbox 360's last release was in 2015, and im not suggesting we shut down all of the servers for old gen consoles.

And honestly i think a decade is more than enough support when it comes to releasing new games. when you think back to 2013, the release of the original xbox one and ps4 and think about what games looked like then vs now and then look at the hardware inside those consoles, retiring them seems perfectly fair, releasing content updates for the games currently on the console and supporting servers for another 3-4 year seems perfectly reasonable, i just dont think we should be releasing 90 percent of games that come out to these platforms still.

ofcourse this is just my opinion but i think that gaming is stagnating a little, though this is primarily visible in the triple A scene, i think the major reason we're seeing such messes from the triple A scene and really ONLY the triple A scene is because of the fact that they're trying to optimise their games for so many platforms, indie titles that are largely locked out of the console market are fairing much better and have become my primary source of gaming nowadays because the quality is honestly at such a standard that i dont think i'd consider buying any triple A games and havent for years because they simply release complete buggy messes that also fail to have anything truly desirable and new about them.

and to be fair, anti consumerism is literally the motto of the console world, these are the platforms that throw money at developers to lock their games down to their platform, charge you exorbitant prices to talk to your friends and unlock a lot of functionality out of your games and charge developers money to update their games leading to a practice of games becoming absolutely content barren on consoles on titles like payday and such, in many ways tightening the hardware gap lightens the load on developers and increases the ceiling potential in a way that i think benefits everyone whilst still allowing those who dont wish to upgrade to enjoy the games they own for several years to come simply being realistic and saying "yeah you know what this console simply can't run these games anymore" because honestly even rdr2 a game that came out 4 years ago, looks pretty much unplayable on an original xbox one... a pixelated grainy mess...

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