Pay to win
Microsoft’s money makes the clearest statement of this gen
We’ll be candid, because somebody has to be: our next-generation transition has not exactly been going swimmingly. In all fairness, we imagine much of the rest of the industry, from the CEOs to the developers to the marketing teams and beyond, might say the same thing. The arrival of COVID-19 has thrown even the best-laid plans into disarray, and everyone has scrambled to readjust. But never have we experienced such a dearth of information when it comes to the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
Normally, we’d have had at least a few opportunities – E3, absent this year, being the big one – to speak with the top execs on both sides by now, to quiz them on the finer details of the machines and the strategies around them. We’d also likely have had the chance to go hands-on with each machine, and to make a considered assessment. On the cover of E256, a full five months out from launch, we were able to show you a PS4 and tell you: “This is your next console”. At present, we’re not sure what to say. It’s indicative of the most confusing transition period ever, thanks in part due to the administrative grenade that is the global pandemic, but also the increasingly fine differences between the current generation and the next.
We’d love to be proved wrong, but opportunities to eat our words are few and far between, as both sides move cautiously: with hands-on events all but impossible, we imagine carefully presented messaging is more crucial than ever to sales, lest too many of the wrong journalists ask too many probing questions, removed from the context of playing these things for themselves. As recently as early September, we were all set to sit down with Phil Spencer, executive vice-president of
Gaming at Microsoft, and his team to discuss Xbox Series X. And then, the leak: on September 7, a tech site posted photos of, and Microsoft’s trailer for, Series X’s long-rumoured little brother, Lockhart.
Officially named Xbox Series S, the all-digital box is designed to be a more accessible alternative to Series X while still offering a significant next-gen tech upgrade. Resolution tops out at 1440p compared to Series X’s potential 8K, and you get four teraflops of GPU processing power – around the same as PS4 Pro – compared to Series X’s 12. But with DirectX ray-tracing capabilities, super-fast SSD storage, framerates up to 120fps and the exact same CPU as
Series X, it’s a hell of a proposition. Especially when you consider that the CPU, at 3.6GHz, has a higher clock speed than PS5 (which doesn’t mean much in practical terms, but is a bit of a blow to the perception of PS5 as the fastest machine). All credit to Microsoft, it reacted to the leak swiftly, and elegantly. Our interviews were still on. And just hours after the leak, a tweet was posted, officially confirming the console alongside its price: £250. The internet exploded.
With Xbox Game Pass now revealed to include EA Play at no extra cost, a range of pay-monthly finance options for both Series S and Series X, and a video showing Quick Resume in action, it looked like it was over for Sony. This was easily the most irresistible, player-friendly deal in console launch history, presented at a time when fewer people than ever can afford to shell out several hundred pounds for a game console. It was a sucker punch for the ages, and one that Microsoft, very much on the back foot throughout the previous generation, had been winding up for seven years. Why announce Series S this late? Because Sony was gearing up to compete with a £600 console. Sun Tzu, eat your heart out. What we would have given to be a fly on the wall when Sony execs refreshed their Twitter feeds that day.
So why was it at this moment that Microsoft got cold feet about interviews? To our mind, it was either a sign of sudden overconfidence or, perhaps more likely, that the reaction to Series S was more than it had ever dreamed – and that there were some further caveats regarding Series S that it would prefer to wait a while, perhaps until preorders were in, before widely discussing. Indeed, it wasn’t long before questions arose regardless. Series S’s 512GB of storage, in particular, has garnered concern from industry professionals, who anticipate a bottlenecking effect during next gen as a direct result of it. Axel Gneiting, principal engine programmer at id Software, tweeted to criticise “the RAM situation,” saying, “This isn’t easy to compensate and drags down base spec quite a bit for nextgen multiplatform.” Senior technical producer at Remedy Entertainment Sasan Sepehr also gave his two cents: “As a consumer, I love this! As a technical producer, I see trouble.”
And then there’s Quick Resume, the most next-gen feature we’ve seen from either console. The demo handler in the
This was easily the most playerfriendly deal in console launch history, a sucker punch for the ages
trailer switched from playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order into picking up where they left off mid-battle Minecraft Dungeons, before then heading straight into a drop-in on Skate 3 – with mere seconds between each swap. Building off Xbox One’s suspend-and-resume tech, Microsoft has essentially achieved current-gen savestates. But with Series S sporting just 10GB of RAM, it’s hard to see where the space to do this is coming from (we note the footprints of the games used to demonstrate this feature become increasingly smaller with each title). Microsoft, it seems, still isn’t willing to share the size of the SSD cache used to do this. To say nothing of the speed requirements: we’re talking about multiple gigabytes of data transfer per second for Quick Resume to work as advertised. If it’s really possible without a serious caveat somewhere, this kind of user interface optimisation could be a real game-changer – but with still Microsoft holding its cards unusually close to its chest, it’s hard to say for sure.
Indeed, if Sony has something similarly brilliant up its sleeve with PlayStation 5, it wasn’t telling during its showcase, which arrived a little over a week after the official Series S price announcement. After a generation spent riding high, it was strange to see Sony so visibly on the defence. Not only was Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and CEO Jim Ryan’s post-price exclamation of “So now you know” a little too conveniently vague – the post-Xbox announcement markdown on both the disc-supporting (£449) and fully digital (£359) versions of PS5, we’ve heard, was eye-watering stuff – but the announcement of the PS Plus Collection was a clear attempt to present at least something in response to the value proposition of Game Pass, adding a selection of PS4’s most celebrated titles to PS Plus subscribers’ software libraries at no extra cost. Although few who bought a PS4 will find much benefit from it, it’s a decent gesture of goodwill to newcomers.
With the admittedly seismic exception of the trailer for Final Fantasy XVI, it was also the only real surprise of the show. Harry Potter RPG Hogwarts Legacy was finally officially unveiled, and the announcement that a God Of War sequel was in the works was, as a good friend of the show remarked, “like announcing there’ll be a Monday next week”. There were exclusives, but all known quantities, Bluepoint’s stunning Demon’s Souls remake among them. And while bonfire fast-travel in that game is now loading screen-free thanks to the capabilities of PS5’s SSD, elsewhere it was tough to see any real nextgen selling points of Sony’s new console – nothing on the level of Quick Resume. Are Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart portals really all it’s got? We wonder whether there’s anything being held back for an 11th-hour reveal.
Especially because it seems as if Sony is determined to be as evasive – sneaky, some might say – as possible with its approach to next-gen. ‘Twas ever thus: almost immediately after its showcase, the caveats began to surface on Twitter – mainly via Geoff Keighley’s account, which seemed strange. After months of Ryan insisting that Sony “believes in generations,” PS5 games Horizon Forbidden West and Spider-Man: Miles Morales will also be available on PS4, it transpired. (PlayStation also announced that the price of a next-gen game would increase: one game will set you back around £70, including launch-day titles Demon’s Souls, Destruction AllStars and Sackboy: A Big Adventure.) And then there was the messy pre-order situation. Technically, we suppose, marketing head Eric Lempel wasn’t telling fibs when he promised PS5 preorders wouldn’t be announced with “a minute’s notice”. Sony gave no notice at all, as retailers began to put up stock on their sites as soon as the showcase ended.
While it’s likely it wasn’t a completely calculated move, it certainly didn’t hurt sales. With trust in the PlayStation brand high after last gen’s decisive win, and firstparty exclusives on the table, legions of people flocked to secure their consoles – with many failing to beat the queues, and others missing the memo completely. Many, however, managed to place their bets on PS5, as potential Xbox buyers trailed in the Twitter polls. At this point, Sony will have to do a lot worse to tarnish the reputation for quality – both in hardware and software – it has built up over the years. Or, indeed, Microsoft could strike with something huge.
And strike it has, that something huge being a chequebook. Brilliantly, the news
With trust in the PlayStation brand high after last gen’s decisive win, people flocked to secure consoles
arrived before Series X and S pre-orders opened: Xbox has acquired Zenimax Media, and therefore Bethesda Softworks, for $7.5 billion. It is, of course, the biggest news of the year, and possibly of the generation. Every future Bethesda game – whether it be the new Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Dishonored, Wolfenstein – will launch day one on Game Pass for all subscribers. Presumably, exclusively – although when it’s a choice between £70 and ‘free’, perhaps it makes no difference whether they are or not. (Microsoft, charitably, will honour Bethesda’s PS5 exclusivity deals for Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo, but there’s surely no way Sony saw this coming when it proudly paraded Deathloop at its showcase.) On one level, it’s terrifying that Microsoft has the funds to just outright buy a chunk of the game industry as we know it. On the other, it’s hard not to enjoy the drama of it all. We can’t imagine a world in which this is profitable for Microsoft, but it is one hell of a statement.
Whether it will tip the balance in favour of Xbox, and the broader ecosystem of Game Pass, remains to be seen – as do so many of the details of this generation of consoles. But if Sony and Microsoft really are struggling to find a no-brainer argument for us to upgrade, it may well be all about the exclusives – and Xbox has just flipped the script on PlayStation entirely.