In hindsight the PS3 didn't reach it's full potential but atleast Sony was willing to experiment with exotic hardware which previously led to things like the cd player, walkman or..aibo. Trying somehow new by definition means a possibility to fail. But what is the alternative? The PS5 has the same x86 architecture as the PS4 and it's better but boring and hardly feels like a generational leap. Playing it safe means no excitement and just repeating the success formulas of the past which is exactly what Sony's current policy is. Just a corporate product which success needs to satisfy shareholders. Nothing wrong with that ofcourse but don't expect novel, risky new ideas for AAA videogames or otherwise with executives that only care about the bottom line and have no personal affinity with videogames. Companies that become victim of their own success is pretty much standard practice.
I don't agree that the PS5 isn't a generational leap. It's intro games may not be dramatically better looking than what you can already find on the PS4. But most new console generations launch with not the greatest potential showcases.
Top that off with the fact that we are basically in a graphical plateau and have been for sometime now, there will never be drastic jumps like from ps1 to ps2 ever again because photo-realism can only get so good.
I'd argue that Demon's Souls' remake is easily the best looking game on any console ever and if you combine that with the nearly instant loading and you have a clear jump between play experiences between Ps4 and 5.
Additionally look at it this way, developers usually need years with a console before they figure out it's limits. Does Assassin's Creed Odyssey not look way better and is a way bigger game than Black Flag (which was a launch ps4 title)? Does the Last of Us 2 not boast better animations and graphics than countless other earlier titles.
You have to view the growth of a system and what can become of it. As developers stop trying to put games on both generations and focus only on the next generation you start to yield far better results and potential of what the new consoles can offer. It happens every single generation. So you have to look at everything around the new system.
Now it might not be worth it to some people to make the leap until the growing pains are over and that's fine, but there is more to "next gen" this time than simple graphical fidelity.
In hindsight when the dust is settled, even considering the requirement of “sweating blood” to take advantage of the PS3 hardware, it will be looked back upon as being well ahead of its time. That alone is pretty remarkable. I mean, even being bottlenecked by the split RAM pipeline and 11th hour off the shelf GPU (it was originally going to use a custom Sony GPU for rendering pixels), there is still nothing like what Sony’s most talented first parties put out. Killzone 2 and its vast deferred rendering and post processing making it look nearly like a damn painting in motion, DOTS (dynamic object traversal system) gameplay in Uncharted 2/3, God of War 3/Ascension, pumping out uncompressed 7.1 LPCM audio when everything else was still using Dolby Digital, “future proof” firmware updates granting 3D Blu-ray playback when even stand-alone players that followed it were rendered useless, running freaking
Linux for homebrew support, etc. Oh, and originally
complete backwards compatibility.
It was ambitious to say the least, but more importantly it was plain
interesting and valuable to those that cared, and something we’ll probably never see again.
Now? It’s great that load times are pretty much non-existent and the DualSense offers enhanced controller feedback, but things like “Tempest” audio could’ve probably still been done on a Cell chip from fifteen years ago. It’s just a shame that it took so much effort to leverage, because it was - and apparently still is - an exceptionally powerful piece of silicone.
But yeah, didn’t make the best business sense by a country mile in the end.
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