PlayStation is done with physical discs. Xbox appears done with… video games? Especially with hardware prices rising and not falling—a trend that’s sure to continue in the coming years—it’s hard not to wonder: What’s the point of even owning a console? On the latest Aftermath Hours, we ponder the console-shaped elephant in the room.
This time around, we’re joined by Wes Fenlon of PC Gamer to discuss his new project: Warp Point, a web 1.0-style webring of video game blogs for the modern era. We discuss how the current internet is dying while a new one struggles to be born and whether or not newer generations will take to a format with which most millennials are intimately acquainted. Does that even matter, though, or is a fixation on numbers and scale one of the main reasons the modern internet turned out so rancid in the first place?
Then we move on to the news of the week: Xbox layoffs haven’t even happened yet, but they’re already causing turmoil for companies like Hitman and 007 First Light maker IO Interactive. And on the other side of our rapidly escalating industry collapse, Sony announced that it’s phasing out physical discs entirely, a quake that will surely be followed by countless ripples. To cheer ourselves up, we close out by inventing the ultimate video game controller, which doubles as the world’s most complicated guitar.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we can bring my Steel Battalion/Guitar Hero controller mashup to life (and then immediately regret it).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: [Removing disc drives from consoles] is a band-aid over a much, much larger problem. You’re gonna knock a small amount of money off the cost of a console, but the prices overall are still gonna keep going up. It’s still gonna be the same problem.
Wes: And we don’t know what the timeline is for these crazy storage costs. But a disc is way cheaper to make than a one-terabyte SSD, for example. So even though the disc drive itself might add complexity and cost to the console, being able to produce those discs and play a game from a disc and install only a portion of the files—that is a cost saving [measure] in some sense.
My bigger issue with this change is: What is the point of a video game console now? I know what a Nintendo is for; a Nintendo is for playing Nintendo games, and that is its own thing. But like, what is the point of a PlayStation? There’s no games on the PlayStation that I would buy a PlayStation for. Bloodborne 2, maybe, I would buy a PlayStation for, but I don’t think that’s happening.
Riley: They said recently that they’re not gonna be putting their games on PC anymore. Is that right?
Wes: Yeah, the single-player stuff, they’re pulling back from. They’re still gonna put their live-service games on PC because they saw that Helldivers money, and they want more of it.
But I’m just like ehhhh. That new Naughty Dog game will probably be good, but I don’t need to buy a now-$900 PS5 Pro to play it.
Riley: I had a PS4 briefly before it broke, and then I didn’t get a PS5, and they put their big games on PC, so it was great. But now I think I’ll just go back to my life before, where I just watched a Let’s Player play a PlayStation game. Oh well.
Nathan: I also think that’s what a lot of people are doing now. And this is actually a good point surfaced by Imran Khan, who’s over at Restart. He said:
“Ultimately I think Sony is following the market, and the market is older, less willing to go to a store and buy a disc, and more willing to just buy new. And the younger generations that run counter to that are not filling in the blank spaces. The trends are what suck here. To be clear, the market being older and younger people not taking their place is a five-alarm fire that no one is noticing.”
And I’m not sure that nobody is noticing; it’s just that they don’t know what to do about it. But yeah, I think that a lot of younger people now, the way they interact with the lion’s share of video games—especially triple-A video games—is by watching a streamer or YouTuber play them. They don’t spend money on them, and so you have a lot of games that still have a profile, and younger people will tune into things like Summer Game Fest or whatever. But it’s not to play the games. It’s because the games are part of a larger entertainment apparatus that they participate in indirectly. And that’s how they’ll continue to do it, because they don’t have money. No one has money.
Wes: Aka, being introduced to Silksong as a meme rather than the sequel to a video game that you played and were excited for the sequel to.
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Riley MacLeod
