TechCrunch Newsletters - Week in Review

Saturday, November 07, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hello hello, and welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote a bit about quarterly earnings, this week we’re talking game consoles.

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The Big Story

I will spare you any election takes this weekend as I’m sure we’re all exhausted from the week, instead I will talk about something I spent the week doing.

There wasn’t an awful lot of non-election news this week, but Thursday and Friday did hold the review embargoes for the new Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles. My colleague Devin Coldewey spent some time with the new device from PlayStation from his place in Seattle while I fired up the Series X and Series S in my San Francisco apartment. It was welcome respite from the 24-hour news cycle, though I was a bit disappointed by the fact that there wasn’t a really fun launch title to occupy myself with.

You can read my full review of the Series X here, where I go into a good amount of detail about my likes and dislikes on the system.

What I want to talk about here is whether these systems actually mean much for the future of gaming.

It’s clear that over the past couple of years it’s been cross-platform titles designed for lowest common denominator systems that have taken over the world. Titles that are playable on mobile, tablet, console and PC have been shown to be the biggest opportunity for game publishers, so how much room is there for a console to make a substantial jump in processing power and it actually mean something?

I would imagine that the PS4 and Xbox One are both going to have long retirements ahead of them with game publishers building titles that are released for these systems or are at least playable through the respective subscription gaming services. And when a title is built with a lesser system in mind, can it even fully capitalize on the advantages of the newer system? It’s especially odd to witness while so many big companies are pushing cloud gaming as the future, a dream of hardware agnosticism that seems at direct odds with selling massive consoles that push limits.

I think that these are going to be some of the big questions we see play out as we enter a new console generation at a time where complex single-player titles are waning in popularity and multiplayer games that are simple at heart but complex to master become the standard pursuit. The next generation of consoles was already going to take plenty of time to come into its own, but I think there’s also the chance that these intersecting plays by companies like Microsoft end up reshaping the landscape in a way where not all of these pursuits can succeed.

Trends of the Week

Apple has one more thing to say
Weeks after hearing about the company’s next wave of iPhones, Apple is hosting a mystery event next week to showcase a new product. Most signs point to the release of a new MacBook powered by a chipset of Apple’s design. More here.

Facebook attempts to grapple with election misinformation
Facebook may have managed to make it through election day itself without any blaring stumbles, but it’s not over yet as the company is reacting to plenty of posts and group content relating to unproven claims surrounding the election. Read more here.

China postpones Ant Technology IPO
In an unforeseen development, this week it was announced that the Shanghai Stock Exchange would be delaying the IPO of Ant Financial, one of the most valuable startups in the world. Read more here.