DF Direct Q+A: Too Expensive? No Exclusives? Is Next-Gen Just For Enthusiasts?

**Rich** (0:02)
Hello there, and a welcome of Indeterminate Temperature to this, the latest edition of the DF Direct Q&A show. Lots to discuss this week, primarily about the fact that the next generation consoles, well, they don't seem to be having much going for them at this point, discussing this and a lot of other topics. Myself, and of course, Oliver McKenzie.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:22)
Yes, there's a lot of doom and gloom starting next gen console. Speculation and rumors at the moment. I'm trying to maintain a sort of consciously optimistic stance, but the rumors and vibes are not good at the moment, I gotta say.

**Rich** (0:35)
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, John Lineman.

**John Lineman** (0:39)
Yes, Rich.
I would agree, the vibes are not good at the moment, and there's a lot of reasons for it, and a lot of it is external to the game industry. So, yeah, we'll see what happens, but still.

**Rich** (0:53)
Yeah, okay. Well, let's crack on with our first question. Okay, so let's just dive headlong into the topic here. We got a couple of questions here. We're going to group them together, since it's pretty much covering the same content. This one from some guy person. You guys mentioned that you feel we're about to see a massive cross-gen period for the next six plus years, which I agree with. If you take the Switch 2 as the baseline platform to target, you can easily run your game at 60 FPS on current gen consoles. We already know this. So the main question is, what will the next generation of consoles do that will make people want to buy them? If future games will mostly run at 60 FPS, what will the PS6 do that usurps the PS5 Pro? Better 120 hertz support, better upscaling, path tracing? I don't see the masses clamoring to pay over $1,000 for some better image quality, even though the people making and watching this channel care very deeply about it. And Alan, the infamous Alan from the Discord, gets straight to it. Hi guys, you talked about cheap ways to get into gaming. John said the 5 Pro could sell out if people rushed to get one for GTA 6, but is a 5 Pro with a disk drive not the most cost effective option to get into gaming now and not bothering with PS6? You'd be able to play all PS4, very cheap physical games, PS5 games with better RT, et cetera, but also with a 5 Pro be able to get halfway into the PS6 generation. All you'll be losing is better RT and other lighting and dynamic effects. You would also be able to add PSVR too as well if you want.
I'm going to go to you first on this, Oliver, because this is an interesting question, right? Because the concept of having a new games console is very, very exciting, but we kind of know what's coming because, well, effectively Nvidia has blazed the trail, so to speak, with the RTX feature set over the past few years.
Is that exciting enough for a next generation console and does it justify a $1,000 console?
What do you think?

**Oliver McKenzie** (2:51)
I think it justifies a $1,000 console to a specific limited slice of gamers. Probably a more limited slice than PlayStation 5 did over PlayStation 4, or likewise with Series over Xbox One last generation. Because I think probably you're going to see a range of fairly iterative upgrades. Like I think you're going to see more 4K 120 support. I think you're going to see support, period, for 4K 240, probably. Some aspect of the HDMI 2.2 spec there. I think you're going to see ray tracing support furthered, but not in any ways that are like necessarily enormous, at least not initially. Because when you look at current generation games, a lot of them are using RTGI, RT reflections. They're already kind of hitting the like low-hanging fruit of game graphics, the stuff that you could really easily improve with ray tracing. With ray tracing and the improvement from like adding an RT shadows, things like that, improving fidelity further, it can be iterative in nature, especially initially expected to be more iterative in nature.
I do think there is probably a real open question here beyond that as to exactly how these consoles will be marketed and exactly what people expect out of them because I think we do see a lot of what we want out of the current generation consoles, especially PS5 Pro. Going to next generation, I'm really not sure how much of that you can really advertise to players as something being genuinely new instead of something that's just an iterative upgrade that is not really selling the console that much. But I would caution people like Alan against the PS5 Pro possibly because I actually did cover a fair number of cross-generation games after this generation of consoles launched. I think we saw pretty consistent trends with consoles like Xbox One X where initially, they were being supported very well and then over time, they were becoming badly underserved where developers were not taking good advantage of the hardware and games were often running with very similar visual settings to the base console counterparts they had that generation.