Michael Pachter has famously said that this current generation of consoles will be the last generation of consoles, predicting that the rise of smart devices will ultimately overwhelm and overtake present day gaming trends. However, it appears as though the continued success of the PS4 and Xbox One has made him change his mind, because he no longer believes this will be the last generation of consoles- just the last successful one.
“You know, I have probably misstated this in the past,” Pachter said.” I’ve called this the last console cycle. I don’t think this is the last time Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo make a console. I think this is the last and most successful console cycle. The next one will come; it won’t be as successful. The next one after that will come and it won’t be as successful as the next one. And they’ll just keep diminishing because I don’t think there’s a reason to upgrade.”
To be fair, he attempted to use a reasonable line of thinking to establish why this is it- and the reason, according to him, is the law of diminishing returns on game performance and visual fidelity, which we have already started to see this generation.
“If all you do on your PC is word-processing, do you really need to upgrade your microprocessor? And the answer is no, you don’t, and you won’t. I mean a 3.5 gigahertz CPU is plenty fast for word-processing. None of us can type as fast as that thing can process, so what’s the point? I think that’s what happens with consoles.”
I mean, yeah, I’d have agreed with him is the PS4 and Xbox One weren’t struggling to run even basic games at over 30FPS. They may have hit the right image quality this time around- but as their performance shows us consistently, there is invariably room for improvement going forward.