Games Inbox: Could memory shortages destroy the console industry?

Games Inbox: Could memory shortages destroy the console industry?

PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X consoles
Will AI be the end of video game consoles? (Metro)

The Thursday letters page is unsurprised God Of War: Sons Of Sparta was unremarkable, as one reader is enamoured by fan remakes of Pokémon Red/Blue.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Console apocalypse
So, um… all this stuff about memory and electronic components getting bought up by AI companies seems pretty bad, right? Like, really, really, bad? This guy talking about potentially a decade of problems presumably knows what he’s talking about, given his position, and that is going to be a nightmare for gaming. Never mind smartphones and everything else.

Do we even know if Sony and Nintendo are safe? They’re not gigantic companies like Microsoft and electronics is pretty much all they do beyond games. Maybe all three will go third party at the same time! I’m not really sure what companies he’s hinting at that could go under, as I’m not sure who counts as a smaller business, but it’s clearly not good news, no matter what happens.

There’s so much going wrong with the games industry, and the world in general, at the moment and yet it seems like it could still get much worse and very quickly. In the worse case scenario you’re talking about consoles, and gaming PCs, being impossible to manufacture for several years.

Whether that would last for a whole decade I don’t know but that’s an industry ending problem. I hope you’re all into retro games, because that might be all we have soon!
Oz

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Monkey paw
So I guess one of the big victims of these memory shortage problems is going to be all those PC handheld gaming devices from companies I’ve never heard of. If even Steam Deck has only sold a few million I hate to think what some of these others are pushing. Even the Xbox Ally one, which I have literally not heard mentioned again even once since it came out.

That’s going to affect the rumoured Xbox portable and the PlayStation one too, to the point where they might just cancel them completely, because I imagine they involve a lot of custom chips – even more than if it was just a home console.

I’m sure no one but them knows the full details but this is all very bad news and yet… if you didn’t want there to be a next generation so soon your prayers have been answered. But you know the problem with being careful what you wish for, since now the PlayStation 6 might not arrive until 2036!
Korbie

Next in line
Like a lot of readers I’m looking forward to hearing abut the third Final Fantasy 7 remake game but I’m also wondering what might get the remake treatment after that is all finished up with. Do they even consider Final Fantasy 7 Remake to be a success is the first big question and I’m not sure what the answer is, other than there’s a good chance it might be ‘not really’.

They definitely seemed to have cooled on the idea of a Final Fantasy 9 remake, as there were rumours like crazy around that for a while. That was only meant to be a lower budget remake too, so that might be an indication they’ve already had it with triple-A remakes.

For me the obvious choices for Final Fantasy are 6 or 10, although personally I’d prefer 12. Final Fantasy 6 would require a completely new game, so I don’t think that will get the treatment. 10 is going to be a big job too, so I’m not honestly sure any of them will get remakes.

I’d love Chrono Trigger, but I think that’s the same problem as Final Fantasy 6, and so I think maybe the most likely is Kingdom Hearts, especially with a new game coming up to promote. Or maybe the answer is none of them. If a big budget Final Fantasy 7 remake only sells okay, what chance does anything else have?
Ochreblue

Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Fan suggestion
I agree that this year is Game Freak’s big chance to turn around Pokémon in terms of the quality of the games and the technology behind them. I don’t know how likely it is, but if they don’t try this time I’m not sure they ever will.

Although most people imagine some kind of amazing high-tech open world I prefer the idea of something closer to the HD-2D style, that’s a mix between modern and retro graphics. There have been a lot of fan mock-ups with this idea over the years and while I don’t think any of them are perfect I’d rather go with something like this but keep it more of a top-down view.

Unless Nintendo is going to spend GTA 6 style money on it I don’t think there’s any point making Pokémon 3D. It’s got to be stylised and it’s got to be more like the wonder of the original Game Boy games. We might get that for a future remake but I’m afraid the next mainline game will just be another low-tech, janky knock-off.
Taylor Moon

You can dig it
Great Reader’s Feature about A Game About Digging a Hole at the weekend. I instinctively knew I would get some form of enjoyment out of it. Digging, collecting ore, selling it, upgrading equipment, and digging deeper? Absolutely all over it for £3.64.

Spaced out on Tramadol for a back issue last night, played for over two hours and it was an almost religious experience. Well not quite, but highly recommended to all other readers, especially for the price.
Whiskeyjack11

Fighting multiverse
RE: Lee Dappa. The closest you’ll get to playing all versions of Street Fighter 2 in one place, as one game, is not on the 30th anniversary collection of Street Fighter 2 but actually on the 35th anniversary collection labelled as Capcom Fighting Collection.

This release features Hyper Street Fighter 2: The Anniversary Edition. You can choose fighters from all versions of the Street Fighter 2 editions in one package.

Choosing World Warrior Ken from the original will give him extra strength, no super move, and he will be a palette swap of Ryu. Choosing Ken from Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting will give him his longer range dragon uppercut and air whirlwind kick and still no super move.

Choosing Street Fighter 2 Turbo’s Ken will give him his flaming dragon punch but less damage, and thus more reliant on combos. But he will have his super move to use and the power bar for it at the bottom of the screen. This would apply to all characters across the games so you can have World Warrior E. Honda vs. Street Fighter 2 Turbo’s version of Blanka, for instance.
Nick The Greek

Online ban
I always wondered why companies don’t just lock a game out until the day it’s released, to avoid all these leaks you always get. It’s literally every game but they never seem to care. But surely it could just work like pre-loading, where you have the game but you’re not allowed to start playing it until the right time.

I guess you could buy the disc and then purposefully keep the console offline, and get around it that way, but who wants that much trouble? And besides, most games don’t seem to work without a day one patch anyway. At the very least a timer would cut the problem down, but the companies don’t even seem to try.
Flint

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What it looks like
I know they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but God Of War: Sons Of Sparta was an out of the blue shadow drop, it had what looked like terrible graphics, and it immediately looked inferior to about a 100 other Metroidvanias you could get instead. And as a bonus it was by some developer I’d never heard of, who’s biggest game was a Five Nights At Freddy’s spin-off.

I feel you have to be very optimistic given all that, to the point where I could probably sell you some magic beans. It’s not a question of whether it’s rubbish or not but if you want to spend a fair amount of money and a lot of time beating it, and I definitely don’t want to. Talk is cheap but time is not and at the moment I haven’t time for 10/10 blockbusters, let alone deeply average Metroidvanias.

I feel there’s plenty of interesting things an indie dev could’ve done with a low budget God Of War game and a 2D Metroidvania with Young Kratos seems like the absolute least exciting option. You could’ve had a game where you played as one of the Valkyries, you could have had a literal god game where you’re populating Midgar with humans, you could’ve had an archery thing with Arteus, heck you could’ve had a sledding simulator and it still would’ve been more interesting that what we got.

I know it was the safe option, but when the best option was probably not making a spin-off at all there’s no point going for the boring and obvious choice.
Campbell

Inbox also-rans
So Highguard has outlasted Concord, but by the sound of it it’ll be lucky see the weekend, so it’s really only going to beat it by a matter of days.
Goops

I really hate that Microsoft switched the buttons round on their controller compared to Nintendo’s. Why do so silly a thing and make it so difficult to switch (no pun intended) between the two consoles. I can never remember which is which way round.
Mobert

GC: They were copying Sega, who they were very cosy with in the initial years of the Xbox.

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