My theory is that there was no reason to make a new generation of consoles, we have reached diminishing returns. People only need their games to look good enough and be big enough and run fast enough, the new generation just doesn't matter anymore.

Then again my primary form of gaming is ascii graphics so...

on the 360 playing battlefield bad company i assumed terrain destruction and stuff would be the norm in the future and maps would be a lot bigger with more people, i was too stupid to realize that the most important part of gaming is that the graphics get un-noticeably, incrementally better over time without any fundamental changes to gameplay or possible art styles, everything must be bland and 'photorealistic' or else it must be Fortnite. I used to assume a good game would get a sequel in a year or two and have significance game improvements, now i wait a decade or more to get the exact same game but with higher resolution and frame rate and new microtransactions

Cost of development is way too high, recession means companies are laying people off and closing whole dev studios, COVID fucked up development timelines for a few years. High interest rates mean no more experimental mid-budget games, only cheap indies and massive bloated AAAA games

This ps5 almost feels like a waste of 500 bucks

that's cause it is

Its the first time really that the consoles haven't actually differed that much and been backwards compatible.

Like yeah the ps2 could play ps1 games but the jump in graphics was so massive that no developer was making cross platform games. Ps3 was another generational leap but also changed hardware a lot making backwards compat not really a thing and same for ps4.

Now ps4 and 5 are basically the same console developers stand very little to lose releasing their game on both platforms. Making an exclusive for the newer console which sold pretty poorly on both sides with still massive previous gen active user bases you'd basically be shooting yourself in the foot making a current gen only game.

As a business I'd want my game to cover as many platforms as possible so the ps4 or switch is gonna be the base target depending on what I would be making.

AAAA gaming ->

Slow development times, Lack of innovation,Third person open world game thats 80 hours of bloat has become the standard.

They are almost reskins of the same gameplay loops

12th game in the same series with the next one coming next year..

Sequels are a mistake, I want fresh experiences.

Safe, safe, safe, chase the mainstream whales.

DLC, 3 Season Passes..

A console plus another controller plus paying for online gaming and a handful of games is the same cost as a decent pc

I'm really digging all the switch games I'm emulating, and I'm playing bomb rush cyberfunk right now which is awesome

barely any games that can't be played on ps4 or Xbox one

One unique intersection here is this:

Dev (say a studio under Square Enix) wants to make game for PS5, dev also does not want to leave 150 million potential buyers ob Nintendo Switch on the table. If dev is already building their game with the Switch in mind, might as well make a PS4 (~100 million consoles sold, probably still many active users) version as well. Hence why so many games have a platform spread that's like "PC, PS5, PS4, Switch".

Exclusives, or even just leaving out lastgen consoles, has never made financial sense but now there's less incentive than ever. See Microsoft had to deliberately cut off its devs from making Xbox One games.

PS5 got rid of themes. That one jazzy song from persona 5 used to be the Theme to Babs's Bf's Apartment, but now the best we can get is a spacey wooommmeoooom.

To add to @queermunist@lemmy.ml's comment, the most difficult and costly aspect of video games are the games themselves, which means that there's also an inverse relationship with companies having interest in making them. Perhaps to investors, hardware has appeared like a sure investment, because they've always ignored how important the games are to the hardware.

Ps5 controllers are dogshit too, just a matter of time for the sticks to stop working.

I think capitalist consolidation of resources and safe-profit-focussed decisionmakers plays a part. We need more mid-budget games, risk-taking and sleeper hits.

Since console hardware is converging towards PCs (as opposed to specialized hardware stratified by make), as well as the expansion of the PC market (which has a massive range of hardware of varying price points and capabilities) the benefits of making a game against the limits of a specific console is less and less of a good idea versus targeting a wide market. If you aren't stuck to exclusivity for a single console, then it makes sense to target previous generation consoles if possible in order to maximize the size of the potential market.

Companies realized that making things feel cool costs more money

Well you're first issue is expecting games on a playstation, something that hasn't happened since the PS2. Xbox, I'm not sure what their deal is. I feel like they are wanting to get out of the console game and focus on pushing games for windows. Nintendo is the only gaming company that remembers that you need novelty to push hardware and keep games on your console.

Though I think another issue is that there's no reason to make games on consoles any more. Everyone has a smartphone and at least a laptop. 'Gamers' all have PCs with dedicated GPUs. Consoles have expensive development hardware and licensing fees. I feel like the Xbox One's focus on an entertainment center device is the correct way to go if consoles want to continue existing into the future.

COVID screwed everything up. A similar thing occured with the PS2 and PS3/XBox 360 with the 2008-2009 financial crash screwing up the releases. If people can't afford new consoles, there's no point in selling games exclusively on them. Up until 2009-2010, most PS3 or X360 games had a PS2 version. I think Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010 was the first mainline NFS game to release exclusively on the PS3/X3360.

I'm not even going to bother buying a PS5.

That's because all they had for decades was the anti-consumer practice of console exclusivity. That has been the sole reason for the lack of some games on some of the platforms.