Fair point on spectating. Watching someone you can’t help or talk to is basically a video with extra steps. The games that got it right let the dead stay useful: Counter-Strike’s dead chat, or short rounds where you’re back in before you get bored. And yes, dropping straight into a balanced match beats sitting in a queue every time.

Hard to argue with. The games people still play twenty years later mostly ran on hardware a phone outruns now; design and solid netcode kept them alive, not teraflops. A PS6 that spends its budget on load times and online play that just works would be the upgrade people actually notice.

The old arena shooters already solved this: on Quake III or UT99 servers you joined mid-match and spawned instantly, and short rounds meant the worst wait was a minute of spectating. Matchmaking traded that away for “fair” lobbies. Would you take worse balance for zero queue?