I finally got it straight (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, August 10, 2020, 12:41 (1354 days ago) @ squidnh3

And if developers have to target hardware down to the Xbox One (like Halo Infinite is doing), then what's the point of having a new console?

Well the point of new consoles is to sell them to people, but the point of Microsoft's current strategy strikes me as a flexible approach intended to appear gamer friendly, as opposed to their Xbox One approach of putting all their eggs in one basket and being perceived as gamer unfriendly (which worked out poorly).

I'll state right now that I have no idea if Halo Infinite is an outlier, or if all new games have to be similar.

Particularly of note is the fast SSDs on the new consoles, and hardware decompression of assets. This in particular opens up huge opportunities for games. But you can see how that becomes useless if you need to also develop your game for a system with a spinning disc that decompresses assets in software. If the next tech is your baseline, you can maximize that to push your engine and your game design in new ways. I'm sure there are lots of creative things people can do with it that we haven't even thought of yet.

It's also even better than what's available on PC.

My gut tells me you're going to see a big difference between PS5 and Xbox games this generation.