The head of the studio behind games like Bayonetta and NieR: Automata has said it’s “hard to get excited” about the upcoming PS5 and Xbox 2 next-generation consoles.
PlatinumGames’ Atsushi Inaba doesn’t seem to think the next-gen of gaming is tickling his fancy. Rumours and speculation about Microsoft’s Xbox 2 – currently codenamed Project Scarlett – have ramped up since its unrevealing showing at E3 2019. We also expect to hear more about the PlayStation 5 soon.
Related: Xbox E3 2019
In an interview with VGC, Atsushi Inaba made a ton of comments about future consoles that were less than flattering. Inaba blames a move towards “off-the-shelf” components as a reason for his downbeat feeling towards the next-gen consoles, adding “it’s hard to get excited about stuff that kind of already exists”.
Going into more detail on his thoughts about the PS5 and Xbox 2, Inaba explained: “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 … It’s nothing that’s disruptive or super innovative”.
Related: PS5 vs Xbox 2
Inaba’s scorn wasn’t just reserved for the Xbox 2 and PS5, however. Inaba continued: “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 … None of it seems unique to that hardware anymore.”
Regarding innovation happening in the games industry, Inaba had kinder words for technology like Google Stadia or Project xCloud: “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”.
