Really what prompts this thought is the refresh that Sony and Microsoft have planned. I can't see how it will be a success, especially if, despite what they're claiming now, the newer hardware gets exclusive games. It seems to me that spending six or seven hundred dollars on a new - , upgradable yes but more importantly scalable - gaming machine is preferable spending four hundred dollars on one and then another four hundred dollars (if not more) on an incrementally better one.
Some people who are able to afford / justify buying the $400 machine for their families would probably drop out of the market at a $600-700 price tag. One of the things consoles have done pretty well thus far is make gaming affordable for those of lesser means.
It would be better in terms of game development, too. Gen 7 was long, and I think it's pretty clear that games as a whole suffered for it towards the end.
One of the advantages of consoles as we know them is that developers knew exactly what hardware they had to work with. I think devs would still find themselves trying to straddle that line between those who have upgraded and those who have not - much as they do from one gen to the next.
But I suppose that eventually the whole concept of console generations could go away, and developers would be targeting minimal system specs, much as they do now for PCs.
And the fact that you'll never have to worry about backwards compatibility again is worth repeating. You've got thirty years of gaming history available on one platform.
That'd be a huge benefit. I think the console manufacturers are taking some steps in that direction. Maybe they've finally figured out that the reason the adoption rates on new gens are slow-starting is because people have game libraries on the former gen they don't want to give up.
You've maybe got me there. I don't know. I buy like 3 games a year, and my entire, shameful steam backlog is only about 20 (although many of those are games that I'll straight up never play that came from Humble deals). From what I remember, used console games were hardly a steal, unless you were buying them like 6 years later, or from a yard sale.
The price of used games is higher closer to release, and then gets cheaper over time - kind of mimicing the price of a new copy. I suspect the used market for console games might be one of the reasons why game prices gradually drop over time post-release. Well, that and the steady stream of ooh-shiny new releases always vying for our wallets.
But the existence of the used console game market doesn't mean much to those of us who buy only 2-3 releases a year and keep them to play multiple times. It is very helpful for those who will play a game only once (if they even finish it), and then move on to the next thing. They can sell their used games, and recapture some of the $ they spend on them.
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