Hi, I am Ricardo Lujan and I am a senior at FHSU. Gaming has advanced a crazy amount in the past 30 years. It has gone from a few pixels on-screen or dots representing characters on screen to almost photorealistic graphics. Visuals have improved so drastically in such a short amount of time that now it’s time to ponder what now? The technology used for games has basically reached its ceiling in terms of the graphics that we won’t see anything other than minor improvements in graphics for a while. What now becomes the selling point for consoles? We have already started to see marketing for consoles change in this current console gen.

One of the main selling points for the new Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X was their SSD drives. These drives would allow them to shorten load times for many games. Sony in particular has shown the power of SSDs in consoles as some of their console exclusives have come up with ideas that wouldn’t have been possible on older consoles. Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart is the main example to look at with how quickly the PS5 is able to load whole new environments in an instant with no load screen.

So what is next? Load times have already been improved to the point of nonexistent in some cases that this can’t be the selling case for the next consoles after the current ones. Will it be maybe controllers, storage space, or some crazy gimmicks like what Nintendo has been doing for the past couple of consoles? I am really interested in seeing what could be the answer and what these corporations are looking at or researching themselves in order to try to stake their claims as to the best gaming console on the market?