I think Sony is just being lazy. 7 years into the PS5/seriesX generation I don’t think we are going to be lamenting the lack of power these things have. The top 10 games are not going to be graphical beast whereas the 500 honorable mentions were not. Good games just don’t follow the graphical calculus like that. I’d take less power and a complete catalogue over what is the latest and greatest, until it’s not (which has been the status quo for everybody but Nintendo).
I just signed up for a year of gamepass mainly because I can’t be bothered to care about downloading 50+ GB files or caring about hard drive space ever again. Those things are vestiges of the XboxOne/PS4 era. If I can’t download and play a game in the time it takes to make a MGSIV sandwich then I just don’t care anymore. If I have to Sophie’s choice every game on my hardrive then what’s the point and the fun starts turning into a job.
A fully backwards compatible disc based PS5 would mean I could get away from playing games in a subscription model or on some marketing schedule. I could just play. As it stands now my collection of Xbox games is my own. I can write reviews for Armed and Dangerous or Red Faction 2 without feeling like a slave to a original Xbox system that might croak. The free games with gold and gamepass games will let me check stuff out on a whim and fall in love kind of like I am doing with outerwild. Sony just doesn’t see the value in me playing Soul Reaver and then me digitally buying up and down their ladder of that serie’s entire offering in a couple clicks and $50 later. It’s another case of accounting running the games division.
I do like the zeitgeist on the latest releases but with monetization the way it is I’d rather look deeper into a catalogue than ahead. My only hope for Xbox is that they write achievements into original Xbox games or make Kinect games backwards compatible too. There’s more mystery, for me, in the games I sat in bookstores reading about for 100s of hours and never touched than the remakes, rehashes, and rote (for aliteration purposes) by committee of today.
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