By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.
Today, any game you make for a modern system is a game you could have made for the PS3/Xbox 360 or perhaps something slightly more powerful.
Certainly there have been experiences that use new capabilities that you can’t literally put on those consoles, but they aren’t really “more” in the same way that a PS2 offered “more” than the PlayStation.
I think in that sense, there will be some kind of bubble. All the companies that thought that AI would eventually get good enough to suit their use case will eventually be disappointed and quit their investment. The use cases where AI makes sense will stick around.
It’s kind of like how we used to have pipe dreams of certain kinds of gameplay experiences that never materialized. With our new hardware power we thought that maybe we could someday play games with endless universes of rich content. But now that we are there, we see games like Starfield prove that dream to be something of a farce.
> By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.
The PS3 is the last console to have actual specialized hardware. After the PS3, everything is just regular ol' CPU and regular ol' GPU running in a custom form factor (and a stripped-down OS on top of it); before then, with the exception of the Xbox, everything had customized coprocessors that are different from regular consumer GPUs.
> By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.
I hope that's where we are, because that means my experience will still be valuable and vibe coding remains limited to "only" tickets that take a human about half a day, or a day if you're lucky.
Given the cost needed for improvements, it's certainly not implausible…
…but it's also not a sure thing.
I tried "Cursor" for the first time last week, and just like I've been experiencing every few months since InstructGPT was demonstrated, it blew my mind.
My game metaphor is 3D graphics in the 90s: every new release feels amazing*, such a huge improvement over the previous release, but behind the hype and awe there was enough missing for us to keep that cycle going for a dozen rounds.
We did get more : the return of VR couldn't have been possible without drastically improved hardware.
But the way how it stayed niche shows how it's not just about new gameplay experiences.
Compare with the success of the Wii Sports and Wii Fit, which I would guess managed it better, though through a different kind of hardware that you are thinking about ?
And I kind of expect the next Nintendo console to have a popular AR glasses option, which also would only have been made possible thanks to improving hardware (of both kinds).
That’s exactly what I mean, too. We obviously will get much better AI. It just seems like the value that most people are getting out of it is already captured, just like how technically impressive stuff like VR is very niche.
By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.
Today, any game you make for a modern system is a game you could have made for the PS3/Xbox 360 or perhaps something slightly more powerful.
Certainly there have been experiences that use new capabilities that you can’t literally put on those consoles, but they aren’t really “more” in the same way that a PS2 offered “more” than the PlayStation.
I think in that sense, there will be some kind of bubble. All the companies that thought that AI would eventually get good enough to suit their use case will eventually be disappointed and quit their investment. The use cases where AI makes sense will stick around.
It’s kind of like how we used to have pipe dreams of certain kinds of gameplay experiences that never materialized. With our new hardware power we thought that maybe we could someday play games with endless universes of rich content. But now that we are there, we see games like Starfield prove that dream to be something of a farce.