Online the rumours have started flying around the release of the Playstation 6 a mere year or so away. 

I’ve long been in “Camp Sony” though I’m not endorsing them or suggesting they are anything but another corporation serving their own interests. But I bought into that ecosystem and I stick with it for better or worse—and usually a lot of indifference.

The swirling rumours touch on the current state of technology in a couple important ways.

First, speculation about hardware costs and the rising price tag on things like memory and GPUs is making the potential buy-in for this future product successor to the Playstation console line seem increasingly out of reach for many people. I mean, at the end of the day these are toys. Toys! Yeah, elaborately complex and powerful entertainment toys, sure, but… toys.  This rising un-affordability is tied to data centres built for AI consuming most of the industrial hardware production capacity for technology for the foreseeable future. In other words, we all pay more because deeper pocketed corps are driving down supply and driving up prices.

What are we even doing?

Second, and maybe more philosophically, I think we once again have to ask the important question: Okay, we get that we “need” to make a bigger, better, faster gaming system or else there is nothing for people who mindlessly drool over tech specs to buy, ahem capitalism, but how is this making better games? No really? One tiny increment closer to photorealism in that game you’re playing is not necessarily a better game. Pixel fidelity and screen refresh rates have nothing to do with the enjoyment of the game, not for most average gamer people. I hate being a broken record on this topic but the best games I’ve ever played are not selling me on the visuals or the performance of the picture that transmits to my screen. It’s about the game itself. It’s about fun.

Again, these are toys.

People will make arguments about lots of nitty gritty things, of course, like processing capacity for integrated AIs, blather on about lighting effects or particle density, and probably get into detailed online quarrels with levels of techno-confidence that is surely unearned, but… really? We’re going to chase style over substance and bend the knee to a technology shortage for the effort of making it slightly prettier?  For specs?

Make a good game and I’ll buy it.

But I’ll almost certainly be sitting out the PS6 until someone gives me a reason to game like a gamer… not like a spec diva.