Will Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 Need Mid-Gen Upgrades?

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are more powerful than anything we’ve ever had before. But that doesn’t mean much.

The PS4 and Xbox One were mid-level even at launch, and it’s been incredible to see how they’ve been utilized by clever developers over the last seven years.

PS4 Pro and Xbox One X were desperately needed when we got to about year four or five, as people started to buy 4K TVs and developers started wanting to push ever so slightly further than they could.

The situation couldn’t be further from the current set of consoles. The Series X and PS5 are both pretty beefy, except when compared to the biggest and baddest of PCs.

But does that mean new consoles aren’t needed? Will this generation skip the mid-gen refresh?

Power and Price

The big reason the Xbox Series S even exists is because Microsoft doesn’t believe console prices are going to drop like they have in the past. These consoles are just too good to slowly slide down in price until you get to the $400 or $300 mark.

That’s the biggest issue facing a mid-gen refresh. Is there any great demand for a PlayStation or Xbox that costs $800? Or more? Maybe, but at enough scale to make it profitable? I would suggest that is a hard sell, especially if the original consoles are good enough.

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These aren’t a complete barrier to release though, but it has two things going against it. It needs to be powerful enough to be worth an upgrade, while also being cheap enough to make it pliable. There comes a point where even the most hardcore of fans should ask whether they’d be better off buying a PC.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend power and price are somehow overcome, and the efforts are worth buying. Even then, is a mid-gen refresh worth buying?

The Need to Upgrade – Are Mid-Gen Upgrades Necessary?

We know these new consoles are filled with things that aren’t getting full use yet. Things like machine learning may make a mid-gen upgrade unnecessary for the vast majority of people.

There’s also things like the Unreal 5 demo, which showcases things so far ahead of last generation that it may be we never actually see anything like it over the coming seven years. Even with an update, a full game at that fidelity (even at 1440p) will be a hard push. Developers aren’t going to make exclusives for a mid-gen refresh.

The solid state drives are really going to come into their own when game engines are updated to use them, and that’ll potentially add a new level of visual fidelity to both consoles.

We haven’t even seen what these consoles are capable of when everything they’ve got packed into them is turned on, and we may not for quite some time. The next-generation may look like it’s started, but it hasn’t even really got warmed up.

And so the mid-gen update feels premature, unless there’s some kind of incredible development in some other field. Will 8K TVs finally be worth buying? If so, Sony and Xbox will need to answer that with games consoles that can properly output at 8K. And not 1440p upscaled. That’s pretty pie-in-the-sky right now, but will it be as crazy in seven years?

Conclusion

What will developments in CPU and GPU technology look like over the next decade? How far behind will consoles be left by PC gamers with plenty of cash? The answer is uncertain, but simple: not as far behind as in previous generations.

Our needs and interests as gamers may change, and that may warrant a new console release. But for the time being, it seems these new devices will last us for as long as they need to.