Words don't really capture my feeling on this whole development. I feel... left out? That might be the right word. With kids and limited time, I can only really justify a console 'once a gen' to both myself and my wife. And I hate the feeling of being left behind, as suddenly I'm playing 'lesser' versions of games [especially, how will this effect multiplayer games?].
And then, when PS5 finally comes out, I'm going to be wary about the PS5.5 so I don't even know if I'll buy -that- at launch anymore like I did with the PS4.
So basically, now I don't see myself getting a console till the PS5.5... and by then, maybe I'll have talked myself out of console gaming altogether.
Darn. I really loved the current console lifecycle, with huge jumps at the end. Iterative just doesn't work for me [heck, I still rock an ancient, non-smart flip phone]. I don't buy ipads due to the iterative cycle either [bought a gen 1 right before the first gen, and it quickly became obsolete when they stopped upgrading the OS and everything started to stop working, so I sold it and didn't look back].
So. Yeah. Darn. It's too early to say how this will pan out, but I fear it's the beginning of the end for my console fun.
I definitely feel where you are coming from. But I think with a busy schedule like you have, maybe consider an alternative timeline.
Being busy will possibly inevitably make you miss parts of a generation here or there. Let's say you want to jump into Xbox or PlayStation a few years after a generation starts, and a .5 console is around the corner in the Fall of the same year.
With this model, you might have 2 options depending on when you decide to get a new console. You could spend less to get the base experience with the same games, or wait a few months to get the stronger hardware at a bit of a premium price. Either way, there's lots of games to buy when you jump into the generation a couple or more years late.
In a way it gives you a choice. Do you want to spend a bit more for the 1337 experience, with up to date hardware that happened to come at the time you got back into gaming? Or would you rather have a little less powerful box but have opportunity to buy more games that you might be interested in? Now you have a choice. After all, you came 3 years later, why not have 3 years more powerful hardware?
Like has been said many times it is kind of like a PC-like choice. It's good in some ways, bad in others. But at the same time depending on your timing of buying a console it can be very good.
Maybe you will get only PS5.5 based on this model, and maybe that will serve your needs better. More games are already out because the generation is already half way in, and you have the more powerful version of the PS5, etc etc.
There's definitely some drawbacks and some good points about this new system. I think the main thing is this: it gives the "new" factor to people who want to jump in at different times during the console life cycle. That is the ideal scenario from Sony or any hardware manufacturer perspective. The platform doesn't "age" in the same way as a traditional platform would. So whenever you do decide to get a new console, at the start of the gen, or the middle of the gen, you can still get a newly powerful console, which is really not so bad.
