by Alec Kubas-Meyer, The Daily Beast

November 2020 feels like a lot of things, but the start of a new console generation isn’t one of them. And yet it must be, since I’ve been staring at the enormous, unmistakable body of Sony’s PlayStation 5 for over a week now, playing games new and old to see what “Next Gen” means for the future of interactive home entertainment.

This is a great time to release a game. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has resulted in huge swaths of the world’s population spending far more time at home than they’d like, and with the rapidly rising infection rates, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, that’s not changing anytime soon. People are starved for content. Netflix has gotten less interesting and more expensive, while the launch of all the new streaming services over the last 12 months—including the already-failed Quibi—has further fractured and confused…