Hardware is difficult to produce, major works are absent, and "next-generation" consoles cannot run.
In the summer when the E3 game show was cancelled again, Microsoft carried the banner of "Game Spring Festival Gala".
On June 14, Beijing time, at the end of the online event "Summer Game Fest", Microsoft held its own Xbox game conference. And this time, all the games announced by Microsoft will land on Xbox and PC in the next 12 months, and they will no longer "draw cakes".
A series of game trailers include Microsoft's own "Forza Motorsport" series of new works, new DLC, its studio Bethesda's new work "Starry Sky", as well as Blizzard's "Dark 4", "Overwatch: Homecoming" and other new works.
Microsoft even brought in a group of Japanese studios that had a better relationship with Sony before. The Persona series, which was exclusive on PS4, and the glorious Three Kingdoms theme of the new "Crouching Dragon" will land on Xbox and join the Xbox Game Pass. Even Hideo Kojima "defected" and announced that he was working with Microsoft to develop a "cloud-based" game.
After the press conference, players from all walks of life lamented that Microsoft launched the "banknote ability" and became the biggest winner of the summer. Sony next door is trapped in the triple "hell" of insufficient PS5 production capacity, slow progress in game development, and declining player reputation. Microsoft used the strategy of tianji horse racing to achieve a "counterattack".
At the press conference, a number of new games were emphasized to support the Xbox Game Pass (XGP) subscription service, and even Microsoft, which is not bad money, has recently exposed a strict investigation of XGP accounts, and many "Taobao on the car" users have been implicated.
But behind this, there is a larger background: the entire console gaming industry is heading for a depression. In the blink of an eye, the PS5 and Xbox Series X have been on sale for a year and a half, and the real "next-generation masterpiece" has not even seen the shadow.
How long will this depression last? Will the so-called "ninth generation" come again?
The big show of Microsoft +B has become the "Spring Festival Gala" | Microsoft in the game industry
01 The "Ninth Generation" who can't run
In 2020, Sony and Microsoft released their respective next-generation consoles, the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Both consoles are priced at $499, up from their predecessors. However, in terms of performance, neither console has a "next generation" level of improvement.
Taking the floating-point computing power of the GPU as an example, the PS5 is only 2.4 times higher than the PS4 Pro, and 5.5 times more than the original PS4. This figure is far less than the 8-fold increase in PS4 over PS3, which is 37 times higher than PS2. The Xbox side is roughly similar.
And even if it is not a "next generation" upgrade, the two manufacturers have done their best. After the release, both Sony and Microsoft suffered a serious "capacity hell".
Although most game consoles in history, in the early days of sales, because of high costs, low pricing, did not make much money, and even sold a loss, so the supply is definitely tight. But the problem is particularly acute in the ninth generation. On the one hand, the supply of chips is seriously insufficient, affecting many industries, including automobiles, and naturally affecting game consoles, in addition, the high price of graphics cards has also greatly affected the production capacity and supply of next-generation host GPUs.
According to game media Gamestop, as of the beginning of this year, the PS5 sold about 17 million units in its first year of release, lagging behind the PS4's first-year sales of more than 20 million and also lagging behind the Nintendo Switch.
CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 has been criticized for quality issues| Xbox
This is not yet the greatest catastrophe of the "Ninth Generation".
In 2020, two high-profile masterpieces that should represent the peak level of generation eight, "The Last survivor 2" and "Cyberpunk 2077", have encountered Waterloo one after another. The former is because the story and issue setting are too radical, which has been criticized by a large number of players, and the latter is because the project management is out of control, and the final production level is seriously lower than the players expected.
The development studios for both titles, Naughty Dog and CDPR, are well-known "quality benchmarks" in the industry. Naughty Dog, Sony's ace studio, has won tens of millions of players for Sony with four Uncharted films and The Last survivor on PS3. CDPR's The Witcher 3 has been hailed as a masterpiece that "defines the quality of the eighth generation of graphics".
The failure of two top studios has thrown cold water on the entire industry. In the past 10 years, with the improvement of game console performance, the development cost and risk of games have been magnified. The two "failed works" mentioned above are both produced in more than 5 years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Such a failure, few manufacturers can afford. At this time, all-in the next generation is equivalent to "leverage on the bear market", betting the fate of the entire studio, or even the company, on a game, and no one dares to do so.
So, a year and a half after the release of PS5, players have not yet seen the shadow of any "next-generation exclusive masterpiece", not even a preview. Compared with the previous generation, the same time node, PS4 already has two next-generation masterpieces, "Bloodborne" and "The Witcher 3".
Obviously, from hardware to software, from manufacturers to players, the entire host ecosystem is not ready to "enter the ninth generation".
02 Microsoft's "TianJi Horse Racing" strategy
For the past 10 years, microsoft has been overwhelmed by Sony in the field of console games. The xbox one console's total series sells just over 50 million, less than half of the PS4.
Therefore, Microsoft actually foresaw the difficult birth of the "ninth generation" from the beginning, and it did not sprint to the next generation like Sony, but left a "backhand".
When Microsoft released the next-generation console, in addition to the more powerful and higher-priced Xbox Series X, it also released a cheap host Xbox Series S.
Compared with XSX, XSS has no optical drive, the performance is worse, the floating-point computing power is even inferior to the previous generation of console Xbox One X, the default resolution is not 4K, but 2K, is a complete "toothpaste suction machine".
The cheap Xbox Series S helped Microsoft fight back against Sony| corriente
But it is XSS, a poor performance, low-priced console that caters to the needs of players and third-party game manufacturers.
Because of poor performance, XSS has escaped a serious "capacity hell", and the supply is relatively sufficient and the price is relatively cheap. In the channel, the price of XSS has long been less than half of PS5 and XSX, stepping on the player's "dessert range".
In addition, with the hardware features of XSS without optical drives, Microsoft vigorously promotes its own game subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, and buys machines with members. For players, as soon as the console is in hand, there are hundreds of XGP games that can be played directly, saving a lot of money to buy games.
Previously, many people believed that in the ninth generation, it was difficult for Microsoft to achieve a "reversal" of Sony. Because the new generation of consoles is forward compatible with the previous generation of consoles, most PS4 players will prefer to choose PS5 so that they can inherit all the games they bought on PS4. But through the XGP subscription service, Microsoft almost packaged the game library of the previous generation and sent it to the player, reversing its disadvantage in one fell swoop.
At the same time, Microsoft also launched the "banknote capability" to continuously attract manufacturers, and also acquired two game giants, Bethesda bethesda and Activision Blizzard, as their own chips.
For third-party manufacturers, on the one hand, following Sony all-in the next generation, the risk is full; On the other hand, with Microsoft "rejecting" the next generation, they can maintain the rhythm of developing games in the past, while there is an XGP subscription service as a basic income guarantee to protect against risks. In this context, it is not surprising that third-party vendors have switched to Microsoft.
This put Sony into a huge passivity. Sony, which originally relied on the PS4 to lead and had a fantastic start, has also recently "fainted". For example, Sony launched its own game subscription service PS Plus Premium/Extra, but neither the price nor the game lineup is comparable to Microsoft.
Sony's high-end subscription service was unanimously opposed by players| Sony
What's more, Sony also requires players who have previously purchased the basic version of the membership at a discounted price to make up the difference in order to upgrade to a premium member. After a backlash from the player community, Sony hastily canceled the policy, saying it was a "technical error."
In addition, Sony's side game has also fallen into an obvious "difficult birth". At this year's press conference, sony barely announced any news of new games except for one "reset" after another. Such a "fried cold rice" behavior has been criticized by many players.
With the XSS as an underperforming "inferior horse", Microsoft is quickly catching up with Sony. In May, Xbox console sales in Japan even surpassed PS at one point, the first time since 2014.
Now Sony, stuck in front of the door of the ninth generation, can only watch Microsoft catch up from behind. Although purely based on the number of consoles, Sony still has the advantage. But just like the two conferences this summer, Microsoft's side is in full swing, Sony is relatively deserted, and the "momentum" has come to Microsoft's side.
03 The broken road of the host generation
Looking back at history, the development iteration of home game consoles has a rigorous rhythm. Every "generational change" is a major change.
For example, in the early days, the replacement of game consoles was marked by "CPU bit width". From 8-bit to 16-bit, the processor bit width doubles, rough understanding, equivalent to the game console processing power increased by 256 times, so every "generation change", the host performance improves, the game's screen will also be revolutionary.
Therefore, for a long time, the rhythm of the development and launch of game consoles by various manufacturers has remained basically the same. Because only in this way can we match the development progress of game manufacturers. Especially after the establishment of the "Suo Soft Ren" three-point world pattern, Sony and Microsoft have been tit-for-tat, even as a "half-generation upgrade" PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, both of which are launched at the same time as if they were agreed.
Behind this, it is actually Moore's Law, which coordinates the pace of manufacturers, leads everyone forward, and enters a "new generation" every few years.
But now, Moore's Law is almost drained. The pace of chip development is slowing down at a speed visible to the naked eye, and the process process is about to hit the physical ceiling in a foreseeable future.
The concept of "host generation" has entered a dead end.
Since the beginning of the ninth generation in 2020, all players have been waiting for the next "big year of the game", but with the passage of time, this "big year" is getting farther and farther away from us. There is no longer a unified, optimistic consensus among manufacturers about the future, and even in the nomination list of TGA games of the year, AAA games are becoming extinct little by little, and can only rely on small independent games to support the façade.
Looking back from today's point of view, Microsoft may have been aware of this for a long time. Therefore, through XSS, this counterattack was achieved by rejecting the next generation.
Microsoft's XGP game subscription service has gained a large number of users with "buy-and-send service| Xbox
However, in this context, after Microsoft's "counterattack", there are still more problems to be solved.
Over the past two years, Microsoft has cultivated tens of millions of XGP members almost "half-sell, half-give" through the policy of bundling machines to give away XGP members. However, this part of the player who gets on the car at a very low cost still has to play a question mark about how willing to pay in the future.
Recently, Microsoft has been cracking down on some rules loopholes, low-price reselling XGP members, and some players who buy XGP at low prices on Taobao have even encountered the situation of "membership cancellation". How far XGP's model can go remains to be tested.
Today's pan-game industry presents a very magical phenomenon: on the one hand, many technology companies are vigorously exploring new concepts such as VR, AR, and metaverse, pointing to a very distant future; On the other side are a large number of traditional game manufacturers, increasingly conservative, and even no longer betting on the future, refusing to enter the next generation.
The two forces represent each side's understanding of the trend, but the real future still needs to be created by their own hands.