There's some pretty rosy glasses being worn in this thread; realistically most people of this era find it difficult to enjoy anything prior to the codified modern design tenets that were only really firmly established by 2009.

Assassin's Creed, for example, depended more or less entirely on novelty factor. It's practically unplayable if you've experienced anything more modern than the second game in the series. Likewise with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I don't see how you could convince me that people area really hyped for that one but not the fourth one in 2017.

The first The Witcher game is not great, by most accounts. Mass Effect needed major re-working gameplay-wise for its modern re-do. Annual football game is nothing to write home about.

Really only a handful of 2007 games stand the test of time, and even the aesthetically stand-out examples like Bioshock or The Darkness or God of War II are relatively primitive in terms their overall design and gameplay.

...and all of this is to say nothing of the sheer number of good games released in 2017. I'm guessing that one can be drawn to the "iconic" games of '07 because we all played them... because there were few other games worth playing. Maybe it's harder to appreciate modern games because we're spoiled for choice; it's harder to just point to "the best three games" and play those because there's such a wide array to choose from.

Uncharted 4 is a pretty notable omission, too, especially when making a direct comparison like this.

For what it's worth, Mario Kart 8 is a dubious addition; it was three years old in 2017, it's just that no one had a Wii U....

It's not for nothin' how much space a few years' worth of game cases can take up. A prolific gamer basically needs a spare room to fill if they both insist on physical games, and never part with them.

It seems fairly easy to argue that "launch" is, by all accounts, the absolute worst time to own a console. For me, personally, it took about two-and-a-quarter years to see value in the PS3/360 generation and the PS4/X1 generation respectively. We're at the two-and-a-half mark for the PS5/XS gen, but I'm going to say that some of that time "doesn't count" due to one of those global crises whatchamacallits.

In other words, the machine is presumably just starting to take off.

That said, you've only mentioned AAA exclusives, which are going to be pretty few and far between (and fewer and farther as time goes on, as budgets expand). If you're not looking at obscure Japanese exclusives, or not getting any use out of PS+ or PS+E, or don't have any PS4-centred pals with whom you play online, there's nothing really that necessitates you having that device.

So you might as well just lock it in the closet till The Uncharted Last of War IIII comes out if that's something you wanna play in like a year or two, or give up on that sparse sprinkling of games and get rid of it, if you can still get a good price for it in this climate.

> it's got the power of an Xbox 360/Xbox one

Those are two different "powers."

That's like saying "it's the colour of an orange/watermelon".

It's true that the categorization describes things that are relatively old because one can track the generations backwards fairly easily, but no one was like "oh man, look at those amazing fourth-gen graphics!" when busting out Street Fighter II on the SNES in 1992. Kind of like how we can describe Cleopatra as being born 69 BCE.

If you absolutely need to discuss console generations and you don't like my idea of simply putting the Wii/Wii U/NS each into two generations, and you absolutely need to use numbers in your discussion, you could always just use the year, or a range of years.

Even then it's a highly-contextualized distinction. PS1/N64/Saturn games all kind of had a certain "look" to them, and there wasn't a huge difference between the hardware requirements and visual fidelity of a high-budget vs. a low-budget game in that era. But nowadays you can have God of War: Ragnarok and Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine on the same machine.

Sounds like you have all the data you need then. The only (minor) pitfall with a Series S is that one can't buy actual games as gifts for kids, as opposed to gift cards/codes, but that might be an academic issue at worst.

I'd recommend branching out with the game selection too; if you restrict yourself to only first-party titles in terms of Microsoft published stuff, you're going to have an even worse time than you were when depending on just first-party Nintendo offerings, in terms of waiting for releases.

The concept of "generations" only really gained traction in terms of Xbox 360 marketing buzzwords, touting it as "next generation" gaming for like a half-decade. I recall redditors struggling to re-phrase things as "current" generation when "next" became especially absurd. MS also called their UI update "NXE" or "New Xbox Experience" pretty much forever too, which has the same kind of absurd timeliness sensibility to it.

Anyway, it's no secret that Nintendo consoles seem to release "between generations," and I've witness somewhat absurd debates online about which "gen" this or that console should be regarded as. I feel like the easy answer would be simply stating things like "X is the contemporary of both Y and Z," but that doesn't slot nicely into a Wikipedia entry.

In the end, I don't think the concept needs to be stricken from polite conversation, but it does become functionally useless this far in to be talking about a specific numbered generation in most contexts. I think we're fine with just saying "current generation," "last generation," and (sparingly and where appropriate,) "next generation."

The Xbox Series consoles simply have more co-op/multiplayer games, (for kids and beyond) and in greater variety, than any other console (helped in part by having more than two generations' worth of backwards compatibility).

If you were restricting yourself to just first-party Nintendo games, you were always in for a bad time as yeah, they're few and far between.

If performance and more game variety are your key desires, then this choice to change it up seems pretty straightforward.

A vital question, though... are you sure your kids like games if they don't play what you get them, or they just get angry or whatever?

Yeah, determining what one wants to play is step one; like, even though Cities Skylines on console supports mouse & keyboard, I find it more comfortable to just use the controller, even though the game wasn't "meant" for it.

If you don't have a high-end PC then PS5 won't feel redundant.

Really, though, you should consider what game(s) you want before considering the console.

What country are you in? That makes a difference re: getting stuff on sale.

Do you already have a gaming PC? What kinds of games/experiences are you looking for?