Atsushi Inaba says the next-generation will be great for consumers, but not so much for development.
The head of acclaimed Japanese developer Platinum Games Atsushi Inaba has revealed that his enthusiasm for the next-generation consoles has been dampened as more details about the architecture of both the PS5 and Project Scarlett are revealed, stating that it’s “hard to get enthused” about them owing to their lack of new ideas.
The new systems have promised to bring about several significant upgrades to their predecessors, including utilizing an SSD, the next generation of AMD Zen 2 chips, and power that will support 8K displays.
But Inaba has stated that he’s not as excited about the idea of ‘off-the-shelf’ hardware being used compared to the custom-made chips of previous generations. Instead of custom hardware, he says the consoles are made up of ‘stuff that already exists’ instead of bringing innovation to the gaming console market.
When asked for his reaction to the plans by Sony and Microsoft speaking to the VGC, Inaba stated “It’s OK. And by that I mean, I’m sure that things will move faster, graphics will be better, and maybe it will be easier with less wait times… that’s good for the consumer.
“But it’s more of the same, quite frankly, compared to previous generations. It’s nothing that’s disruptive or super innovative, if you ask me. Game hardware used to be about custom chips that you couldn’t do on PCs. Now you look at it and they’re just grabbing stuff that already exists.
“The Switch, for example, is a Tegra which already existed and the other consoles are using very similar chips and graphics cards to what you see on PCs, but maybe slightly updated. None of it seems unique to that hardware anymore.”
Instead, he is more intrigued by the rising quality and prominence of cloud-based technology, with services such as Google Stadia, id Techs Orion, and even Microsoft’s xCloud providing further innovations in technology.
“It’s hard to get excited about stuff that kind of already exists, but has been repurposed to a certain degree,” he told VGC.
“That’s why for me, things like cloud platforms represent innovation and something very, very different – they’re platforms that excite me and where I feel there is a lot more innovation happening.”
This comes after also confirmed that Bayonetta 3 is still in development and doing well, and their showing of Astral Chain during Nintendo’s E3 direct Conference.
