In this week’s newsletter: With players caring less about advanced graphics and high-spec systems, the industry battleground is shifting away from hardware
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Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.
“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”
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