Thoughts on this current generation of consoles (PS5 and Series X/S)? How do you feel about them having SSDs? Do you think offering two versions of a console is a good business idea (physical/digital for Sony and Physical, more powerful/digital, less powerful for Microsoft)?
I mean, I don’t have either one, yet. I did not end up getting a stimulus payment like I was told that I would, and while I’m not exactly flat broke, I’m not in a position where I can drop $600 on a game console and feel comfortable about that.
SSDs are... whatever. It worries me that these consoles are always capturing video and what that’s arguably doing to hardware with a finite number of lifetime data reads and writes. Especially because, if I remember right, the PS5 SSD isn’t user servicable. If it dies, you have to pay a repair cost to send it to Sony. That’s aggravating.
I also still don’t really know if SSDs are so magical. I have a laptop with an SSD and it’s nice being able to turn the system on and have it booted in to Windows in under a minute flat, but it’s not, like, a hard-line requirement for operations, you know? Reducing loading times aren’t really something that’s high on my priority list.
Especially considering that, like... I play a lot of Fortnite. I play on PS4, and I occasionally play with a friend who plays it on PC, where he has it installed to an SSD. His load times... aren’t really that much faster than mine. They can be, depending on the context, but in the case of an online game like Fortnite, you’re often waiting for the server to respond and send data. He loads back out to the menu way faster than I do, but when we’re connecting to a match, I think he’s only faster than I am by 2-5 seconds. Which to me is... pretty insignificant. Making it seem important feels like marketing smoke and mirrors to me, like how they kept “inventing” shaving razors with more blades.
Like, my PC doesn’t have an SSD in it yet, and does it bother me? Nope! Because I never turn my PC on and then instantly sit down at it. I wake up, turn the system on, and then go make breakfast and whatever. It takes my PC about 2-3 minutes to boot up, and it takes me a good 15-20 minutes to make breakfast, so by the time I’m ready to sit down everything’s been warmed up and ready to go for a very, very long time. Getting a faster load with an SSD isn’t going to offer a meaningful benefit to that experience.
I’m sure I’ll have friends pitching an SSD at me after reading that for other reasons, but I just feel like those people got spoiled by something they don’t actually need and now they’ve tricked themselves in to thinking they can’t live without it. I don’t even bat an eyelash at PS4 games with 20 second load times. Who cares? You aren’t going to be getting anything meaningful done in 20 seconds. “But it adds up” yeah but so does everything. You spent longer pooping than you did looking at loading screens. You’re not going to die waiting 22.8 seconds for a level to start, and it costs a lot of money to fix that minor inconvenience.
I don’t like the idea that they made the disc-based versions more expensive. That’s a very marketing way to nudge fence-sitters to adopt digital, when we’re having more and more examples of what going all-digital is going to do to our libraries of content. We lost hundreds of WiiWare titles and are about to lose hundreds (possibly even thousands) more when Sony locks down the PS3, PSP and PS Vita servers.
I get it, digital is convenient and takes up less space, but you aren’t as protected digitally. Did you know that I lost my entire library of 25+ Google Movies because of a change Google made to “Brand Accounts”?
There’s very little I can do about it. Because ten years ago Google+ made me define my personal account as a “Brand Account,” now Google gets to take away every movie and TV show I own through them. I can still technically watch them if I switch to my “real name” (which is the same account, but also a different account, for some reason), but then I can’t access my subscriptions feed or favorites list.
And stupid garbage like this just happens with digital content, because there’s nothing you physically hold in your hands. You are at the whims of however they allow you to access what is ostensibly THEIR data, and that includes taking away your ability to access that data entirely. You can protest that, I guess, but that won’t change the fact that your ownership means very little to them.
And it’s only going to get worse from here. It won’t make them care any more than they already do. Just like charging for online features that are free on other platforms, they will find the minimum acceptable threshold for your frustration tolerance and they will still figure out how to make you do things their way. They will put you in a position where 99% of your library is digital and by the time there’s a problem you’re already too deep to back out. And then it just becomes “an unfortunate symptom of business” that people blindly swallow because they’ve never known anything better.
So when I say, “there is no way I feel comfortable dropping $600 on a game console right now”, that’s because I will only buy these things if they include the disc drive because I will hold on to that thing for as long as I humanly can.
By which I mean: in 2028, when the Playstation 6 arrives, it’s going to be a tiny little Chromecast puck you put behind your TV and I will be laughed out of the room for wanting a disc drive. That already happens whenever I tell people I still have a disc drive in my PC that I need to replace. Physical media?! Everything should be ephemeral!
Needless to say, I don’t like it, and I don’t feel like there’s anything that can be done about it. I’m only considering buying the new consoles because I kind of have to, to stay “relevant.”
