PS5 and Xbox present strikingly different visions – and both bring big positives for games

So this is it: the new consoles are here. Well, not , not both (or all) of them: along with many of you in the UK and Europe, I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my own PlayStation 5 next Thursday. But look, there on my desk, peeking discreetly out from behind the monitor as I type this: a real, live, retail Xbox Series S. Isn’t it lovely?

And here’s the thing. Whisper it, because it feels like there has been too much good news already this week, and we’re not used to it, it’s making us suspicious. I think it’s going . This is the best generational shift in consoles in a long time; not necessarily the most exciting, but the most upbeat. The most optimism-inducing. It’s certainly better than last time. PlayStation 4’s launch slogan was “for the players”, which was an effective rejoinder to Microsoft’s ill-begotten Xbox One strategy, but away from that flattering mirror, it never really felt true. The PS4, with its conventional architecture and basic feature set, its overpowered graphics processor and underpowered CPU, its emphasis on , was a tactical retreat onto safe ground. It was simple, it was sensible, it was effective, but did it really make things better for us? Did it move our gaming lives forward? Barely.

This time, it’s different.

Well – it’s not different. Once again, there is not much between the PlayStation and the Xbox in power or design (leaving the outlier of Xbox Series S to one side). Their engineers were working from the same basic silicon, and seem to have agreed on the same priorities: that a big boost in CPU power was a must, after a generation of graphically lavish but computationally weak consoles held back developers’ ability to innovate; and that fast storage and vastly reduced loading times were also essential to improving the experience for players. It may take years for the first of these priorities to bear fruit, but the second is the most tangible quality of life improvement when using one of these consoles now – and it may not be glamorous, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hugely impactful. It means hours of your life reclaimed, the distance between you and the games you love reduced, and those games materially improved (taking Forza Horizon 4 as a personally game-changing example).