>>22298
Depends on which games you want - there are exclusive titles on both.

Without wishing to start a religious war, PS4 won this round of the console versions - I own two.

Like >>22299 says it sort of depends on the exclusives. You'll have a good time with either one, but the PS4 is definitely a bit better performance wise. I feel like the Xbone has a more fleshed out marketplace, so you can buy and install a fuck tonne of games, including 360 games. Might be a good way to catch up if you're that out of the loop. Playstation also offers this, but to me it doesn't feel nearly as expansive a library.

Honestly if you're coming at it from a fairly fresh perspective, don't have a tonne of online mates on one platform or the other, just pull up a list of exclusives and see which you fancy. If all else fails, flip a coin - you're not likely to be disappointing with either.

Sorry if that doesn't really help.

>>22300
>a tonne of online mates on one platform

Yeah this is a useful consideration.

>>22299>>22300
To be honest, there's not really any specific games I'm looking for. The Xbox ones seem slightly better, but nothing that I'm overly excited about that makes it a clear winner.

The advantage the PS4 has is that I've owned all three previous generations whereas I've never had an Xbox of any kind.

I'm not in a rush, so I might wait until December and get whichever one I see first on HUKD when the likes of Tesco and Asda have reduced their old bundles (usually the previous version of FIFA) to around £100.

>>22302

>The advantage the PS4 has is that I've owned all three previous generations

This is a reasonable metric, especially considering the controller basically hasn't changed. The Xbox controller is still great and I'm sure you'll get used to it, mind.

One thing I'll say in favour of the Xbox is that it has accidentally become my home media centre just because it does everything in one place in a relatively seamless way. Like you say, whichever is a better deal when you come to buy is probably the best bet. Don't forget the updated versions of each, the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X - they may be a nice price around then too, and offer a bit more oomph (and 4k)

Consider buying/building a modest gaming PC for £500 instead. It'll probably be cheaper over the long run considering you're not paying an extra £50 a year to play multiplayer, and the games are much cheaper. I would also argue that amount of worthwhile exclusives for the PC makes the PS4 and Xbox libraries look like a joke.

>>22304
Crypto mining has made this practically impossible without using second hand parts.

>>22305
To say nothing of the endless updates, tweaking Windows and device driver bullshit. Sure, the games look much better and there are exclusives, but I like to turn the console on and be playing games about 20 seconds later.

Can I just politely stop the console vs PC argument here before it starts. I can sense a very tedious avalanche otherwise.

>>22307
THE OP KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING WHEN HE STARTED THIS.

>>22308

Tch. Fine.

WHY BUY A DRMBOX FROM MICRO$OFT OR $ONY WHEN YOU CAN BUILD THE WORLD'S BEST GAMING PLATFORM YOURSELF?!

Crypto has made me consider buying a console for the first time in 10 years. Samsung has completely fucked the RAM market too, because there aren't enough forges to meet demand for the phone and desktop market. Why crypto go away, lads?

>>22310

I hadn't even realised it got this bad.

I actually have a BNIB 1080 Ti knocking about in the house somewhere (don't ask) - it's literally doubled in value since I bought it. Hilariously for the average shmuck it'd have been a better investment to buy all the parts for a bitcoin rig a year ago then sell them today than it would have been to actually mine with it.

They're both much of a muchness. The PS4 has a slightly better selection of exclusive titles, but it's nothing major.

Microsoft and Sony have recently released updated versions of their consoles, but the only real difference is beefed up graphics to provide 4k support. They're both committed to supporting their current-gen consoles for the foreseeable future.

If you're out of the loop on games, check out Metacritic. They have aggregated review scores for game reviews. The scores aren't infallible, but the top rated games chart is a good starting point if you want to catch up on the best titles.

http://www.metacritic.com/game

Do bear in mind that on either console, you'll need to pay an annual subscription of about £40 to play online multiplayer games.

>>22312
>Do bear in mind that on either console, you'll need to pay an annual subscription of about £40 to play online multiplayer games.

You wot?

>>22313

Yeah, you have to subscribe to either PSNetwork or Xbox live to play online. You do get a free half-decent game or two a month as part of that subscription on both platforms, which balances it out for me but yeah, you still have to pay them.

Ostensibly it's to pay for the multiplayer hosting needed for online, but....

>>22314
PSnetwork is fine actually. You get a couple of shit games per month, maybe a couple of them per year are good.

Lots of games actually still do multiplayer just fine without it, they just don't shout too loud about it.

>>22315

Xbox live gold is the same, and I've actually got some good games out of it (there's also discounts in the marketplace I believe)

It used to be one Xbone game and one 360 game a month, it appears to have moved to two Xbone games a month now. If you get one game you might have otherwise bought for 30 quid out if the 24 a year, you've broke even anyway.

I seem to remember on the 360 you had to pay for it even to use netflix. Dark times.

>>22316
Another thing you can do on xbox is share one account with two consoles, allowing game library to carry over and effectively making it possible to buy one digital copy of a game for two consoles. Via account transfer and 'home xbox' feature if anyone is interested.

With a bit more effort you can also buy from different regions for cheaper still.

The digital games at full price are extortionate otherwise.

>>22317

>The digital games at full price are extortionate otherwise.

I could never quite work out why they're more expensive than the physical copies. I'm sure there's plenty of valid business reasons, I just don't know what they are.

I'm fully invested in digital games, mind, I think I own about three game disks now and 50+ digital. It just means I have to wait a few months to play things, but that's more than okay.

>>22318
Charging less for games encourages people to pay less. Literally all it is. Whoever said "digital distribution will pass savings onto the customer" was shot for it, I have no doubt.

>>22319

Maybe I'm an edge case but if the digital versions were £48 like the physical release copies, I'd probably buy a load more at full price - I might even pre-order, which is their ultimate goal. But as it stands the digital releases are at £54.99. And I don't really want the disk copies so I wait a few months and they end up only getting maybe £30 out of me.

What is that extra 7 quid for?

I have both, and the PS4 gets a lot more use. Multiplatform games tend to run better on basic PS4 compared to basic Xbox One, and PS4 has a lot more worthwhile exclusives than Xbox One, particularly Japanese games.

>>22321
I've somehow managed to avoid either without even having to upgrade my rig. My 290X is still chugging away, but it's starting to struggle in recent months and I'm worried about Cyberpunk being able to run at all. The crypto bubble isn't going to pop in time, I don't think.

>>22304
I have a PC, I suppose I could get something like Steam Link and a couple of wireless controllers but for some reason I don't find it as chilled out as console gaming.

If you have a 4k telly and want to watch 4k movies, get the Xbox.

If you like the look of the playstation exclusives, get the PS4.

Not really a difference between the two apart from that.

I use them equally but find myself watching more movies/TV on the xbox. It's the only way I can justify dropping all that money on the thing just to find out Halo 5 is shite. Forza is sound though.

>>22324

The first gen Xbox one isn't 4k, is it? Only the newer (expensiver) Xbox one X.

Get the PS4 Pro. It's marginally more expensive than the Slim and will get you better performance. In the long run this could mean titles locked at 30fps vs 60fps (as the new God of War title is rumoured). The PS4 exclusives are without a doubt better than the XB1's, and will remain so. Japanese gaming is in a great place irght now. It's got less media bollocks than the XB1, but you wanted a console right?

>>22325
Xbox One S, which is the standard one now, has a 4k Blue Ray drive.

>>22328

Not bad then, considering the price of standalone 4k Blu-ray players.

>>22329
And it's a plenty good enough 4k Player too. You'll only get better in proper top line videophile kit.

Is forking out an extra £200/£300 for a PS4 Pro or XBox One X over the standard versions worth it or is it only marginal gains, especially if you don't have a 4K ultra-HD telly?

>>22392

I don't think so. The S and PS4 do 4k anyway, 500 quid is getting close to might-as-well-buy-a-gaming-PC price range.

>>22393
I just upgraded my GPU. I didn't realise you can stick a new GPU in a 8.5 year old machine and have it perform at >90th percentile. I thought my CPU would hold it back and be leagues behind current developments, but no. I'm guessing games have become much more multithreaded over that time also.

>>22394

CPU development has been fairly lateral for a number of years now, for technical reasons I'm not clever enough to fully articulate. My laptop's about 8 years old too but the clock speeds aren't that far behind new products.

>>22392
Even if you don't have a 4K telly, if you care about framerates then it might be worth dropping more on a Pro/X. I think a lot of games run at around 30FPS on the standard consoles, but target around 60FPS on the enhanced consoles. Also if you're considering getting a PSVR you probably need the Pro.

>>22394

You would notice an improvement if you upgraded it. But it's not a big enough difference to justify the several hundred quid it costs you in the end for a new board and memory too, compared to the bang for buck you get with a new graphics card.

You will probably get away with keeping that CPU until the next gen of consoles come around, which isn't going to be until the next decade. That's what I plan on doing anyway, and hopefully by then they've invented a VR headset that doesn't make you hurl your guts out too.

Asda are starting to reduce prices on their old Xbox bundles, including reducing the Xbox X Far Cry 5 bundles to £150 rather than by £150.

>>22395

I recently paid £800 for a desktop that has the same RAM and roughly the same clock speed as a desktop I bought in 2011 for less than £400 - it does seem to be a lot faster than my old one, though. I can only guess that's down to DDR4 and "more cores innit".

>>22437

PC hardware has got a lot more expensive over the last couple of years. It's partly the fall in the pound after the breferendum, partly a price-fixing conspiracy between Korean memory manufacturers and partly the huge increase in GPU prices due to Ethereum miners. The Ethereum bubble has burst and the US Department of Justice are suing the Korean RAM cartel, but the pound is probably only going to get weaker.

The biggest single improvement in the real-world performance of PCs has been the introduction of fast SSDs. They're orders of magnitude faster than traditional hard drives, which has a huge impact on boot times and task switching.

>>22395

Clock speed isn't the most important metric for processor power, it's the architecture that counts. IPC (i.e. how much it can calculate at a given clock speed) increased significantly since the Core series of CPUs were released, although the pace of change has been a lot slower than it was in the past.

The best illustration of this is probably AMD, who were lagging and pretty much a pointless purchase until last year but now with the Zen architecture and Ryzen processors they're closing the gap performance wise with Intel despite their newer processors being clocked lower than some of the old ones.

All that said I bought a Core i5 750 at the end of 2009 and it's still fine for 99% of things. Best value for money PC component I've ever bought.

>>22436

Bloody hell that's good. I have a first gen Xbone so I'm not really in the market for one, but it's still tempting.

>>22440
It was posted on Hot UK Deals on Wednesday evening and I think the majority of the remaining bundles around the country were subsequently snapped up by around midday yesterday. There might be some stored in the lockups where they keep the games; your best bet is to ask someone working there with a scanner to look up item 502775710870 to see if there's any in stock.

They reduced the Xbox One S bundle with Rocket League to £100 so the other discontinued bundles, like last year's FIFA and Forza, should follow shortly.

My AMD HD 7950 3GB is starting to chug, especially as I have a 1440 monitor. Any of you two know what would be my best value for money upgrade? I don't mind buying used, or a couple of generations old.

>>22442

What's your budget?

In terms of pure FPS-per-pound, the best option is the GTX 1060 6GB. A 1050 Ti won't be a particularly significant upgrade over your HD 7950. If you want to play current AAA titles at 1440p, a GTX 1070 will probably last you a bit longer. Expect to pay about £240 for a 1060 6GB or £370 for a 1070. Those prices might drop a bit after the release of the 20-series cards on the 20th of September.

I'd be slightly wary of buying a second-hand GPU at the moment. Most of the cards on the market are being sold off by cryptocoin miners, so they will have been running 24/7 for the past year or two. Miners tend to slightly underclock their cards for efficiency reasons, but there's still a reasonable chance that the fan bearings are shagged or the thermal interface material has dried out. That's fixable if you know what you're doing, but you won't be saving a huge amount over the new price and you'll be getting a card that has had a hard life.

>>22442

You can get a R9 580 8gb new for £270 and not even have to upgrade your drivers. It's a cracking budget card.

>>22444

OcUK have the 8gb RX 580 for £240 if you don't mind getting a slightly ugly card. The RX 580 more or less matches the performance of the GTX 1060, although it draws about 10w more at idle and 60w more under load. The 580 is probably a better choice if a) you're primarily a gamer, b) your monitor supports Freesync and c) your PC has decent airflow.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/powercolor-radeon-rx-580-red-dragon-v2-8192mb-gddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-18l-pc.html

>>22443
Yeah, in a post-cryptocurrency world I don't think I can ever buy a second-hand graphics card again.

>>22443
>>22444
>>22445
>>22446
Cheers lads. My phone's just decided to shit the bed, so I'll put it on hold for now, but that OCUK rx580 looks like a decent deal.

One of my workmates has brought a PS4 to work so the night shifts would be a tad less shite.

I can't get used to a gamepad for shit - it's just too alien for me and I get lost in all those buttons and sticks. But I have to admit that whoever had decided to add that little sensor panel to it was at least partially a genius.

Sage for off-topic.

>>22449
It works like a track pad if you tell your computer it's a Xbox controller too. It's actually a very nice gamepad, even if the triggers are a bit small and lacking travel.

>>22450
Also I really appreciate the trigger buttons or whatever they're called. Makes some GTA V missions easier where you need to maintain a certain speed.

Black Friday looks like slim pickings. Tesco have an XBox S 1TB dual controller bundle for £159, but it doesn't look like there's any PS4 deals whatsoever.

>>22534
SHODAN is doing $5 for lifetime membership, down from $50.

>>22534

Apparently Tesco are doing the PS4 with RDR2 for £220. Nowhere near as good a deal as the Xbox One S offer, but it's better than nothing.

>>22535
Isn't that the computer from System Shock II?

Sony have revealed the first details of the PlayStation 5 today. Is there any point in getting a PS4 now if the PS5 is likely to be out in the next year or so?

https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/

>>22803

The PS4 is too huge to die overnight, so the question is do you want a console now or would you rather save a few quid and get it later.

>>22803
Damn, Todd and Aaron were right.

>>22803

You should be able to pick up a really cheap second-hand PS4 fairly soon, along with a big library of perfectly good games. If you're not a hardcore gamer, it makes a great deal of sense to deliberately stay behind the curve - you get to play exactly the same games, you just save loads of money if you don't mind waiting a bit.

Microsoft are launching a digital only version of the XBox One. Presumably they're still looking to kill of the second-hand disc market.

>>22807
That's fine, it seems pretty clear that by space year 2030 no one will actually own anything, stuff will just be licensed through a handful of giant conglomerates.

I look forward to submitting my Facebook account to Amazon Prime to see if I've built up enough social credit to lease a couch. That's assuming Disney haven't had me blacklisted for what I said about the new Dumbo.

>>22808

>it seems pretty clear that by space year 2030 no one will actually own anything, stuff will just be licensed through a handful of giant conglomerates.

I doubt any of us have ever owned any piece of software in a very long time. It's all licensed.

>>22807
The argument for this is rather than actually buying digital games, you'll subscribe to the Game Pass service, which to be fair is pretty fucking good.

>>22809

Speak for yourselves, I've been pirating everything since I was 14. I do exactly what I please with my copy of Photoshop. It'snot exactly a long shot to say that's what's really behind the drive to make all games into some sort of shitty multiplayer "live service" ala Fortnite.

I wonder how exactly they'll squeeze any more blood out of the stone after that- How long before we see full on pay as you go games? I bet western publishers have had a jealous eye on the Korean market for a while now.

>>22812
What's wrong with Fortnite, by the way?

>>22814
As someone who has played it a fair bit, my main issue with it is that the aiming accuracy is absolute wank.

>>22814
I hate to be the kind of reprehensible scum who links to a long YT video and says "watch this", but this is quite worth watching. What are you going to do instead? Spend too hours having a wank?

I don't want to be completely down on Fortnite, as it has reached a level of pop-culture relavence not seen in gaming since Halo 3, but fundementally the way it makes money out of its (very young) players is deeply troubling. Also I don't trust the Chinese.

>>22816
>fundementally the way it makes money out of its (very young) players is deeply troubling.

Disclosure: I haven't watched the video.

What's deeply troubling about it? If you pay £3.99 for the Battle Pass then you don't need to play it that much to be able to earn enough V-Bucks during the season to purchase a Battle Pass for the following season, which in turn would enable you to earn enough to purchase a Battle Pass for the season after that and so on. They even gave everyone the chance for a free Battle Pass at the end of last season because they were shitting the bed over Apex Legends. It's not that much of an outlay for the amount of game time people will get out of it.

>>22817

The battle pass is just the start. The business is built on cosmetics which cost a lot more and their actual in game store is basically a lucky dip in that you don’t know what’s going to be in it until you log in, so players are forced to make buying decisions then and there or fear missing out being able to get them later.

>>22817

Tere's a lot of cynically deployed and deeply, intentionally manipulative mechanics going on with it. On the one hand you can look at it as "well it's not that expensive monthly" but you can also look at it as an insidious entry fee after which they try their level best to milk what they can out of you.

The problem, the actual problem, is that videogames literally make more money than any other form of entertainment media (that's just a concrete fact by now, it's the single most profitable entertainment business right now), and yet it's somehow still not enough. They have to try and wring even more profit out of their business model year on year.

Remember when people thought horse armour DLC was getting cheeky? Remember when online DRM was seen as intrusive? We've just let all those things slide now, and the AAA market is saturated with games people would have recognised as F2P app-store garbage ten years ago. If you don't already think it's getting bad yet, how much further are you prepared to let them push it?

>>22819
>The problem, the actual problem, is that videogames literally make more money than any other form of entertainment media (that's just a concrete fact by now, it's the single most profitable entertainment business right now), and yet it's somehow still not enough.
Randy Pitchford has to pay for his jailbait porn somehow.

>>22819
>how much further are you prepared to let them push it?
What the fuck are you implying here? Some kind of video game armed revolution?

>>22812

>Speak for yourselves, I've been pirating everything since I was 14.

So you don't own any of your software either, do you? That doesn't change my point.

Even if you paid for a game or Windows or Photoshop, you don't own it. You hold a license to use it. This has been the case for as long as I've been using computers, and the lack of a physical disk changes nothing about the way software ownership (or lack thereof) works.

As someone who has a steam library with thousands of pounds worth of games I've barely touched or never actually installed, I actually see the appeal in pay as you go games. It doesn't really feel like a heinous corporate control measure, as I'm fully aware that already exists and has done for decades.

For the record Xbox Game Pass seems like the future to me. I regrettably don't have the time to play games all that often, and I did get a bit sick of staring at games I'd paid fifty quid for just gathering dust. Now I can jump in whenever I want at a much lower price point, I don't think a year of Game Pass costs much more than a single new release title.

>>22828

Most of the people that do the development groundwork could probably push for that. They really don't get paid much compared to the money the companies are raking in.

>>22819

You seem angry that video games are becoming more affordable and accessible. Did you really think the £60 AAA disc release was the optimal, fairest solution to gaming?

I'm not a fan of micro-transactions and will pretty much avoid any game that has made them integral to the experience - I will never play Shadow of War, even though they've 'fixed' that now, but you know what, that's okay, because I also now get to pay six quid a month to access an increasingly impressive digital game library.

I will be annoyed if the prices of digital releases don't drop in the next few years, mind. I'd much rather every single game in the world had a cosmetic loot crate system in it if it actually subsidised the sticker price of the game, but as it stands it's still slightly more expensive to download a game than it is to get the disc, which is all sorts of daft. I do have hope the shift towards disc free consoles will herald a more 'steam sale' approach to the digital console marketplaces. Time will tell.

>>22831

They're still adding microtransactions to £60 AAA titles. They're selling £100 premium versions of those games, because loads of content has been carved off as day-one DLC and £60 doesn't get you the full game. The whole industry has gone fucking mental.

>>22828

No lad. Just pirate it instead of paying. Were fortunate enough to live in an age where you can have your cake and eat it- You can vote with your wallet and still have the game. If you pretend that that's somehow morally wrong then you're either sheltered, naive, or both.

Videogames make silly money. If we want them to improve the only way to do it is to stop incentivising the greed by buying into it. You're not going to be putting some poor starving Dev out of a job- There's a separate discussion to be had there about unionisation for developers and rebalancing the role of publishers and executives etc.

Indie games gave us a brief hope but they're really just AAA lite by this point. Support small devs. Think of it like you would the music industry- You support the bands you like by buying their shit and going to gigs, but they make fuck all off your Spotify subscription so you literally might as well pirate it. The only benefit you get from that is the moral high ground.

>>22831
>>22833
I mean on this theme
>Did you really think the £60 AAA disc release was the optimal, fairest solution to gaming?
I'd have to answer yes. If your disposable income is near zero, £10 is as inaccessible as £60. If the whole game is on one disk, you get a pretty equitable breakdown where people who could afford to pay usually did, and people who couldn't would pirate. It's something I've always appreciated about games as a hobby in a way - other than the hardware costs there was a sort of equality about it all that you don't find in a lot of other hobbies.

There's perhaps an argument that it's not sustainable but I'm increasingly coming to the view that most of the best games have already been made.

>>22834

There was always preowned, too. The live service/digital distribution model conveniently kills that dead.

I can only see it as entitlement on the part of the publishers. They were already making plenty of money but they see it as their right to make even more money, year after year, forever. Not just in games, to be fair, but other digital software. We've lost the inherently democratic nature of a product being something you buy and subsequently own, and can do as you see fit with. It baffles me really that people are just fine with it.

In our hellish dystopia of a future, you're going to have to pay a subscription for the DRM on your Google Mind, and every time they release a patch you'll go blind until they reboot the servers. This is how it starts.

I've seen bundles for the digital only XBox One for £160 (Sea of Thieves, Minecraft and Forza) so it mustn't be selling well. I think the PlayStation Classic has now dipped below £25.

New Xbox confirmed for end of 2020. Hyped up to be many times more powerful than One X, big focus on backwards compatibility too. Wonder how much it's going to cost, reckon it's not going to be cheap.

>>22877

I thin MS are trying to make a big pivot towards the PC end of the market. Their console is essentially going to be a midrange PC and all their games are cross platform with PC.

Makes a lot of sense really. God knows why they've been competing with themselves all these years. That leaves Sony free to cater to the more "core" console gamers, and Nintendo free to cater to the sort of people who buy iPhones because they don't understand Android.

>>22878

I was going to say something similar, but more along the lines of why I think it won't work - if the next Xbox is just a premium priced midrange PC, then won't people just go and buy a better, actual PC for the same money? You can build (and people do sell) small form factor gaming PCs for about £400, so the new Xbox would have to either be making a loss, or not as powerful as they'd like. I know they've got AMD onside and they're about to pull ahead in the CPU power game, but still.

>>22879

Probably doesn't really matter. The hardware is never the main profit driver, as I understand it. Sony have nearly always sold consoles at a loss- They're an electronics giant with a gaming wing. Microsoft's bread and butter is software and licensing, the 360 was an anomaly compared to their usual success with hardware. The more they integrate it, the less likely they are to have another failed console on their hands to explain to shareholders, it's just another moderately successful product ticking along alongside their Surface computers.

I reckon we'll see them blur the line more and more as time goes on. Like Epic, they appear to have woken up and realised that, despite years of neglect from the big publishers and all that "hurr piracy" rhetoric, Steam has been sat quietly printing a big fuck off pile of money this whole time. They want in on that.

>>22879

The quality of the experience matters. The most compelling reason not to own a PS4 was "if you don't play very often, you'll spend half your time waiting for system updates to download". PC gaming is far worse in that respect - there are all sorts of annoyances and booby-traps that nerds don't really notice but are a complete dealbreaker for normal human beings.

MS could do quite well with a new Xbox that offers a PC-level gaming experience with a minimum of fuss.

>>22881

I'm not sure this has been true for a while now. I'm certainly a nerd, but I'm one with limited time on his hands, and still notice the annoyances of PC gaming when they come up, but they come up increasingly rarely, especially when we're thinking of it in terms of pure Microsoft services. Hardware compatibility issues are incredibly rare, especially for midrange components and gaming accessories - I haven't had to install a driver for about eight years for a PC component or controller etc.

A gaming PC you buy from Argos with Windows 10 on it is definintely as plug and play as an xbox, particularly if you've owned an xbox before - you can literally type 'games' into your search bar on your desktop, log in to your Xbox live account and start playing something via the microsoft store. And with the newly launched Game Pass for PC, it's all just there.

Yes, there's updates and so on, but they're all as automatic (and as frequent) as the xbone. Perhaps I'm still not capable of imagining someone young enough to be into gaming but old enough to not know how to use Windows 10, and it seems like MS know these people exist too by the sounds of it.

I'd not be entirely against a £500 Xbox (or whatever) to replace my aging PC - despite being fully technically and financially capable of building a high end rig, or even probably a better one for the same price, those days are probably behind me. My PC cost a couple of grand to build in 2015 or whatever and is still more than decent, but with an i7 4790k in there and only ddr3, I can imagine a Project Scarlett with more power or at least better performance to replace it for a Reasonable Amount of Money, and I'd probably buy it.

>>22882

Middle-aged men are now the key market for the gaming industry. They grew up with games, they have plenty of disposable income, but they don't necessarily have the time or the inclination to do even the smallest amount of pissing about. They might only have a couple of hours a week when they've got the big telly to themselves and they're perfectly happy to pay for convenience.

The traditional market of kids and young adults has no real room to grow and is now dominated by a handful of time-sink titles - Fortnite, Apex, Minecraft, Fifa etc. It has descended into a zero-sum game and everyone knows it - there's still plenty of money to be made, but everyone is fighting harder and harder over the same pool of money. The Wii meaningfully expanded the market for gaming, but it just didn't have any staying power.

The new Xbox might find itself uncomfortably squeezed between the PC and Google Stadia. The hardcore gamers are migrating towards PC, because it offers a fundamentally better experience if you spend a lot of time gaming. Stadia offers an incredibly compelling proposition to serious but time-poor gamers - plug a tiny dongle into your telly, pay a tenner a month and get instant on-demand gaming with absolutely zero faff. If Microsoft have big expectations for the new Xbox, it'll need to be vastly more convenient than a PC and offer a substantially better gaming experience than Stadia.

https://store.google.com/product/stadia_founders_edition

>>22883
The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform built for a city with fibre and a plan with no fair use policy. That combo represents less than 5% of the population of America, nevermind the rest of the world or our Victorian infrastructure.

>>22884

To be fair almost anywhere in the world has better internet infrastructure than the States with their state-wide monopolies and so on.

I see Google making the same old mistakes other young and disproportionately successful tech companies have made before them. All their ideas are factastic if you live and work entirely in a tech-savvy, forward thinking city like San Francisco, but they're less than useless and even an active hindrance when you live in buttfuck nowhere and cable TV is still seen as something of a luxury. They're going to get over-confident, push something unproven, and take a big dent for it.

But yeah, with regards to Microsoft I think they're simply taking the first steps in a direction people have predicted for a long while. The traditional consoles are going to increasingly overlap with PCs, while the new consoles for the casual gamer who wants literal "turn on, press start" simplicity will increasingly drift towards streaming/subscription.

We've already seen the performance arms race slow down a lot over the last couple of generations, thanks to parity across the consoles. We're already at a point where really, when you really boil it down, the only component that matters is your GPU. The consumer will benefit from better price/performance ratios, and need to upgrade less often. But we're very likely to see the customisation potential decrease. I wouldn't be surprised to see a PC gaming market in 10 years time where your graphics card is essentially a console you shove in a PCI-E slot and bingo, you're PC gaming.

>>22885
https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

>>22885

>they're less than useless and even an active hindrance when you live in buttfuck nowhere and cable TV is still seen as something of a luxury.

Those people are broke, so no-one cares what they think. They might as well be farmyard animals. By 2119, there'll be a thousand people in Patagonia gilets designing luxury space yachts for each other, while the rest of us forlornly nibble on Soylent crumbs and hide from the deathbots.

>>22886

What point are you trying to make? The problem is America's internet varies wildly from dial-up only across whole suburbs, to 1gig super fibre in your swanky city centre high rise, and in many places consumers have effectively zero choice over their package, and therefore no way to avoid peak time throttling etc.

Over here, you might not see average speeds as high, but there's a much better chance you at least get to choose between Virgin or BT, meaning the service you get at least has some incentive not to be completely shit.

>>22887

Except they're not. I've been places in America where the people are disgustingly opulent. The plots their houses are built on will be bigger than most streets over here, but will you fuck get a mobile broadband signal. They'll drive cars that barely make 20MPG but they'll look at your smartphone like you're trying to impress somebody, because they haven't even quite caught on the the standard £40 a month payment plan idea yet.

TL;DR America is wierd.

>>22889
I'm aware America has had those problems and surely still does to one extent or another, but there's no way you can defend the statement "almost anywhere in the world has better internet infrastructure than the States" when they're posting top 10 average speeds.

And who cares if half of America can't buy it? That stills leaves a market much bigger than the entirety of other countries they've deemed worth entering. I also don't think Google is betting even 1% of their success on the likes of Stadia. Game streaming has been on the cards for years and with all their datacentres and fibre they may as well toss their hat in the ring.

>>22890

I can defend it, because my whole point was that average speeds have nothing to do with the average consumer experience. Most Yanks I know have shite internet and constantly moan about it.

With regards to Google I will admit I am just wishfully thinking that they will over-reach and collapse, before they get their slimy corporate hands on the blueprints for actual T-800s and start selling them to hipsters.

>>22892
Most yanks I know have gigabit connections and are constantly raving about it.

>>22893
What about the Yanks you don't know?

>>22894
They have gigabit connections too, but don't rave about them.

OP here, finally going to get around to buying a console later this year under the guise of a Christmas present for laddo. His friends all own Xboxes so my current line of thinking is:

• Buy the Xbox One S 1TB bundle with two controllers, FIFA 20 and The Division 2 for £199.
• Trade both games in at CeX for £50 in credit and buy a few games better suited for him, along the lines of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Monster Hunter: World, Tekken or Overwatch.

https://www.game.co.uk/en/m/1tb-xbox-one-s-with-extra-controller-fifa-20-the-division-2-and-now-tv-2662111