This week starting pistols were fired on the next leg of the games console arms race with the US release on Thursday of Sony’s new Playstation 4.

The UK release will be November 29, and Microsoft’s Xbox One lands next Friday, November 22.

Everyone with at least a passing interest in video games is turning into a frothing hot mess right now. But are these consoles worth your money? My answer: Probably not, for now.

Here are the brand new things you can do with them. You can enjoy a redesigned case. You feel smug about owning the latest hardware. You can use a new design of controller. There’s… an optional camera.

But when you are considering spending hundreds of pounds on the upgrade there are things you might consider.

Games consoles aren’t cars; more horsepower doesn’t mean an instant burst of speed. Over time developers get better and better at wringing cool tricks out of the hardware they’ve got in front of them. This is why games released this year look better than games five years ago, even though they run on exactly the same console.

So right now you’ve got all this extra power, but in the hands of developers who just haven’t had the time to maximise it’s potential.

This will, looking back to the launch of the last console generation, take at least a year. Christmas 2014 will look a lot more futuristic than this one.

It’s a rare event, a new console. It’s exciting to adopt one early on. It feels like living in the future. But these feelings make up most of what you’ll get for paying a premium to be one of the first. The chances of a significant price drop by next Christmas are high. You might want to wait for it.