Those were kinda justified with the mass 4K TV adoption. I don't particularly mind the XSS, but I hope we don't get mid-cycle refreshes with spec bumps again.
While that is true, doesn't the fact that 4k gaming is extraordinarily inefficient compared to the perceptible gains in quality still justify a two-tier system?
I don't know what really qualifies as massive success but I am pretty sure the normal consoles outsold them by at least an order of magnitude. At least with those they were launched years after the base consoles but now they want to basically release them all at the same time.
The real question in my opinion is, what difference will consoles now have versus PCs ? You now have tiers of performance just as with PCs, exclusives seem to be less and less of a thing. Why buy a console ? They are willingly removing the only advantages these things had and they simultaneously make development harder.
Cheaper consoles will always sell better, so that's not surprising by any means. And of course MS doesn't publish console sales numbers, and Sony doesn't split theirs between the base PS4 and the Pro. But they have both been said to sell (very) well by the companies making them - and to be frank, given the cost of these machines, they would have been quickly discontinued if they didn't. They have also been massive drivers for mindshare gains, and largely reignited the idea that console games can look good, something that quickly fizzled after the low-tier hardware both console makers pushed out in 2013.
I reckon 480p is enough too, because you can probably still tell the players apart in games. Come on. 1080p is the resolution of the past generation, do people even look into 1080p TVs these days when they buy something for their living room ? So how did you work out that it's enough for "95%" of the planet ? If they buy 4K TVs, they want 4K content as well.
Running games at above consoles quality and performance is "not that great" ? You don't need to be a geek to run a game at higher resolution and notice that it's better.
The thing is, gaming at 4k is ... well, pretty stupid. At normal TV sizes (40-65" depending on where you are in the world) and viewing distances, the perceptible difference between a good 4k TV and a good 1080p TV is near zero. There are some marginal gains in sharpness and detail, but the biggest gains are in new technologies that are rarely found on 1080p sets, such as HDR. And that, after all, works just as well on 1080p content. Given that both "flagship" consoles aim for "true" 4k gaming with the sacrifices in power and price that entails, it makes perfect sense to make a "entry" console that plays all the same games at the same frame rates and with the same
feel, just at a lower resolution. Will they look as good? No. Will the two configurations be perfectly balanced? Of course not. But it will nonetheless be trivial for developers to implement a second performance tier - in many cases it might be as simple as lowering the rendering resolution and perhaps dropping AF or AA by a notch or two, though many will no doubt also put in the relatively small extra effort of making lower-res assets for the lower end configuration. The point being: if an XSX can play, say, Fortnite at 4k120-ish, and the XSS can play it at 1080p120-ish, the experience of play will be pretty much the same. Not identical, but
very similar. One can thus justify calling this the same performance level at different resolutions (obviously not just "the same performance level"), especially as metrics such as frame times, responsiveness, input lag, loading times, etc. will all have just as much if not more of an effect on the perceived performance of the system than the rendering resolution.
Your comparison to PCs is also a complete false equivalency: here we're talking about two performance tiers (three in terms of games that also launch for the high end versions of previous gen consoles), with essentially one fixed set of variables (either tier A with attributes x, or tier B with attributes y), while for PCs the performance tiers are essentially endless - there are at least three generations of GPUs from two vendors that are still relevant, with anywhere from a handful to a dozen SKUs per generation, with vast performance gaps, and several models come in different VRAM configurations too. There are a decade's worth of CPUs, ranging from 4c4t to 16c32t, at widely varying frequencies, with different levels of cache and other relevant attributes. There are at least three relevant RAM levels - 8, 16 and 32GB - three major 16:9 resolutions, a jumble of 21:9 resolutions, and even 32:9 cropping up. Even just simplifying this down to simple base variables - CPU, GPU, RAM and resolution - you have a vastly more complex system than an A/B choice of console performance tiers.
