From article:
According to multiple people with knowledge of Nintendo’s next-gen console plans, the company is likely to release new hardware during the second half of 2024, to ensure that it has ample stock available on day one and to avoid the kind of shortages seen with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Although specific details on the console are being kept closely guarded, those VGC spoke to indicated that the next-gen console would be able to be used in portable mode, similar to the Nintendo Switch.
Two sources VGC spoke to suggested that the console could launch with an LCD screen, instead of the more premium OLED, in order to bring down costs, especially considering the increased storage needed for higher fidelity games. The current Switch comes with just 32GB of internal memory, while many current-gen PlayStation and Xbox games are over 100GB.
Yeah, notice how I used “might” in my comment. That’s a modal verb of “maybe maybe not.” PC Gaming is just as easy to use as a console. PC Gaming, however, looks expensive. It isn’t, if you math geek yourself out and realize that instead of buying consoles multiple times, you can pretty much stick with the same PC in the same time period. With my gaming PC, all my stuff connects to it by Bluetooth. It’s ready to go when I switch it on. I can play most of the games on it that are available on whatever console, except the few that are exclusives tied to a particular console. Even better, I can play games to my heart’s content. I have a library to choke a horse and it will be viable probably until I’m dead. The problem is when we talk about money. To have a nice gaming PC or gaming laptop, you have to shell out double what a console costs. What a lot of people can’t think about is: You shell out more on the gaming PC, but it is viable longer because it is not subject to the whims of console makers. Sure, you can just shell out 400 bucks or whatever on a Nintendo Switch instead of shelling out 1000 or so on a gaming PC or laptop (some of them are 2000 or more). However, the computer, if you know how to take good care of it, is viable twice or three times as long as the console, so in the end, you’ve made a good investment and you don’t have to worry about changing consoles when the company that makes the console decides to produce a new product. This is what I was talking about. People don’t understand it perhaps because they don’t think about it, but they really should because it’s a money saver in the end. Plus: You can play your old games just fine for as long as you want.
PC gaming is not cheaper than console gaming.
If you bought a state of the art PC during the PS4 era, it was more expensive than the PS4.
Then when the PS5 was released, if you wanted to upgrade your PC to be on par with the PS5 it costed more than the PS5.
I love PC gaming, but except for the cheaper games, it’s absolutely not cheaper than consoles.
Except when the console maker decides to make a new console and decides what games will no longer work on the new console and what will. Or, perhaps the console maker decides that you can play some of your old games on the new console, but decides that to do so you have to buy a subscription, or you have to buy the games again because they had to make a new version of the old games that work with the new console. A PC will outlast that. You can buy two or three consoles, or buy one PC. Doesn’t look cheaper to me. Then, I’ll add to my comment: When it’s finally time to buy a new PC, which for whatever reason you have decided on your own because nobody cancelled your PC, you take your whole collection of games to the new PC and they work just fine on the new PC, plus you can have the new games that your new PC can run.
I agree that PC gaming has a lot of benefits, and it’s also my preference, but if you want to keep a rig that plays current games at their best its not cheaper.
That’s the trade off. If you think you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest hardware you are going to have to shell out the big bucks. More often than not, a game looks the same to me whether its played on this year’s graphics card or last year’s graphics card or even the year before last’s graphics card. At some point speed and memory size are numbers that don’t need to go beyond a certain point to give you decent software performance. People will disagree with this and I think that’s fine. Maybe my eyes are wonky. Who knows? My wonky eyes save me money. The graphics look about the same to me using this or that graphics card.
You don’t need to buy a state of the art PC though. You can play most indies on a ten year old laptop, and you can build a good enough PC for the same price as a console and all its peripherals. The real savings are in the software though, you don’t need to pay full whack for games when you have steam sales, free giveaways, and the ability to play anything that anyone has made for the last few decades!
Cloud gaming is the future. For $20/month and 35ms lag, I render my games on an RTX 4080 rig and stream it to my living room tv