Topic: Tea-Leaf Reading, No Spam Involved

Hey you! What are you looking so down for?

How about it? Want me to read your fortune? A bright future! A happy future! Oh, but don't hold it against me if it's not a great prediction!

Oh, so sorry! I'm a fortune telling machine. The name's Cait Sith and together with this community I shall predict gaming's future.

• Cait, Final Fantasy VII

Have any predictions for whatever gaming's future holds? Drop 'em here whenever you think of something, so that when the time comes you can be proven right... or wrong.

PlayStation and/or Microsoft will drop the subscription requirement for online play. Pretty bold, right?

Whenever I see tea leaves in the bottom of my cup, it usually means my tea bag split.

Okay, I'll give this a shot... Sony's PlayStation5 will either have some form of portability (beyond "unplug it and carry it round to your mate's house") or integrate with an additional companion peripheral (for less than £100) that allows for on-the-go play.

That's one of the less-barmy Switch reaction pieces that I've thought could hold some water.

gaming predictions OK then let me think....

Nintendo will release a "Switch Pro" basically the same machine but the dock will also act like a power boost and bring the system up to the level of the PS4 and XB1 WHILE DOCKED allowing publishers to release DOCKED EXCLUSIVE games for the system that it can't play now also it will have a built in HDD for game installs and be available to buy separately for current Switch owners

Sony will integrate PSNow into PS+ thus giving you access to all those games instead of a section of games each month

The PS5/XB1 will have some kind of handheld function or a mobile App to play all games on the go

people will shut up about cross platform play because it's just a gimmick they are using to get popel interested in their systems

Sony will add PS1 and PS2 Disc Backwards compatibility and PSP digital to the PS4 and MS will add TRUE backwards compatibility to the XB1(and no having a selection of games that they choose for us doesn't count, if it did the PS4 would also be backwards compatible thanks to PSNow) by letting us play ANY disc based XB and 360 game

Nintendo's next system will be the most powerful system of the 3 (yeah a long shot)

@KratosMD Especially since (as always, Sony ahead of the curve) it's what they attempted with the PS Vita, not only with streaming PS4 games but with a library of near-PS3 quality exclusives, like Uncharted, and ports of current PS3 games. It's a shame that the PS Vita didn't quite work out the way it was intended, but Sony are usually pretty good about stepping back, noticing the refinement of others and taking them to heart.

I can't decide between this, or the prediction from @Kidfried about dropping the price entirely.

@Kidfried Ha ha I wonder where you got this idea from? I expect a share of any profit you make lol.

I agree with @FullbringIchigo with ps plus and ps now. That will come with a big price increase though.

@Kidfried At first I thought this was some sort of spam post 😂

Well, I can't see MS/Sony dropping Online Subscriptions - its too lucrative. I know that PC gamers don't pay, but they also don't get 'free' games like we do. I do think that Subscriptions keep the initial cost of a console down too and mean Sony/MS can sell at a loss - or at 'cost' anyway - not counting the profits margins for distributors and retailers.

It's possible that Sony and MS will offer 2 consoles - 1 maybe without a Disc drive for digital/streaming gamers and maybe Sony will look at mobility too - although as we know, that is unlikely to provide the 'power' or 'next gen' features - like Ray Tracing for the games we could see. At best, with the 'current' state of mobile hardware, you could push to get maybe PS4 type specs at the most but with battery life with screen res and 'cooling' affecting battery drain - hence the Switch goes for a 720p screen and drops the power down to prolong life mean that anyone expecting a PS5 mobile device is unrealistic. Sony 'could' stream PS5 games that are basically running on a PS5 but realistically, the best you can hope for is a portable PS4 in essence - at least in the next few years unless we see some big breakthrough in technology - inc battery life.

As for the consoles themselves, it really depends on 'when' they release more than any other factor with regards to power and capability. Its no secret that the current consoles are very weighted to GPU in terms of 'balance' and I expect both to address this. I can understand why, especially if you look back to 2012/13 with the economic crisis and analysts predicting the death of the console. Both 'needed' to make a next gen system but with things the way they were, they had to make consoles that delivered games that 'looked' next gen but with 'reasonable' costs and so opted to go 'cheap' on the CPU and bigger on GPU.

Whether we get a 'Pro/X' after a few years will again depend on the specs of the next gen and how well they deliver the 'quality'. During this gen, we had the emergence of 4k and VR. Also, the games releasing often struggle to deliver 1080/30 (unless built specific for the hardware), Hence we see so many games using dynamic scaling and unlocked frame-rates to try and improve consistency. Its not 'just' resolution of course as the visual settings, things like shadow quality, reflection quality, draw distance (not just how far you can see but the distance that shadow quality changes, the distance that certain objects pop in, the distance that textures change quality etc), particle effects etc etc all make a difference in performance and resolution potential. Point is, if the 'next gen' consoles are delivering native 1800-2160p, 60fps with medium to high quality visual settings for at least 5-6yrs, then I see little point in bringing out a more powerful system to bump the graphics up a little bit - if they are dropping to 1440p (or less) and struggling to perform consistently, then I can see maybe a Pro/X type console again. The emergence of these boosted consoles was more to meet the quality of HDR TV's and emergence of VR rather than anything else and I am sure that both could have seen out at least 5yrs had 'HD' still been the 'highest' display tech.

I have thought for years, that 'next' gen, is much more applicable than naming this the 9th gen. Its much more applicable to calling the 'next' Sony, the 5th gen Playstation and next MS, the 4th Gen Xbox. You rally can't call the Switch for example as a 9th Gen console when it can't play the majority of 8th 'gen' games (assuming you call the PS4/XB1 as 8th gen consoles). In fact the Switch has more in common with the 7th gen PS3/XB360 which probably could play the games the Switch has (Wolfenstein 2, Doom) at similar visuals/frame rates - maybe struggle with the RAM. That isn't a 'slight' on Nintendo btw, its more about putting things into some perspective and you can't see the Switch playing the games that PS5/XB2 could play so to call it 'next' gen when its not playing 'next' gen games is ridiculous. You wouldn't call a 'new' console (say Google or Apple join the console market) that plays 360/PS3 games at that level as being 8th or even 9th gen because of their release date. As such, I cannot count the Switch as being the 'first' 9th gen or being a 'next' gen console when both the base XB1 and PS4 are actually more equipped to playing current/8th gen games. Nintendo, as we know, are on their own path and as such should be looked at separately from MS/Sony and not compared to their consoles. It makes much more sense to view each as their own 'gen' so Sony are releasing their 5th and MS their 4th.

Anyway, after that little 'rant', I do wonder whether we will see a 'big' jump in GPU with next gen PS/XB hardware. I doubt we will get a 4x jump over the Pro/X specs - meaning 16-24tflops - somewhere between 8 and 10tflops is what I would expect with at least 12GB of RAM - maybe 16 at the most. The biggest jump will be in CPU - maybe up to 2x faster (1.6ghz to 3.2ghz) with Multi-Threading capability. Even a 4core, dual threaded CPU at 3.2ghz will be more than twice as capable due to improvements in technology so maybe we could see a 6 or even 8core CPU to really push gaming forward...

Regardless, I am looking forward to the future of gaming...

I can imagine there being further integration with Twitch etc on PS5, maybe a built-in camera so we can film our reactions while we all lose at Fortnite 2.

I can see them going further down the sharing route. Hopefully they'll throw in a free printer so we can print out all our best pics from photo modes. Let's have a laminator while we're at it, too.

Also (and I always seem to annoy people when I say this, so sorry in advance) but I don't think PS5 will be backwards-compatible. It's just a feeling I've got. Remasters have been such a big revenue stream this gen, I don't think they'll be too willing to give it up. Hope I'm wrong, of course

@Tasuki Me too lol. I thought, "Why does spam have so many replies?" Then I saw it was legitimate.

Sorry about the confusing title. I just wanted to be creative 🤔

Drop the dvd/bluray drive from the PS5 and have it as an optional extra.

Ha ha yeah I thought this was spam too!

@FullbringIchigo A Switch Pro like you're describing won't work. The Switch is connected through USB-C with the dock, so a dock with additional computing power won't work. The USB-C port is too much of a bottle neck to have that amount of data passing through it. The only option is to release a dock that has a full console built in it, but that's going to be expensive, and at that point they may as well include a card slot and have it work as a separate console.

@hotukdeals This is an interesting one. Rumours are that Xbox might release with two models at launch. We're PkayStation to do this, I could see them going for a PS5 Go kind of model.

My prediction for next gen, Sony releases a more powerful system, possibly with the ability to steam it (from your PS5) rather any sort of on the go Switch like feature. They already have started with PS Now and the ability to let someone stream your game to someone’s else’s console and let them control it. It won’t be streaming based and Sony will advertise hard on that if anyone else like MS tries.

@Jaz007 That last sentence sounds like such a Sony thing to do.

@Jaz007 I certainly hope we wouldn't be able to steam it, ps4 had enough heat, I'd rather we get the ability to cool something

@NecuVise The PS5 will be able to double as a clothes steamer and space heater in the winter.