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Motion Control To Lengthen Console Hardware Cycles
With the recent E3 demonstrations of new motion-based control for consoles — Microsoft's Natal, Sony's Motion Controller, and Ubisoft's camera-based system for the Wii — analysts now expect the current console generation to last longer than normal. Microsoft exec Shane Kim said he expects the Xbox 360 to last until around 2015, in part due to Natal and new services available through Xbox Live. Signal Hill's Todd Greenwald thinks this cycle may not need to end at all:
"Microsoft and Sony have invested so much in their current hardware line, as have third party publishers, that we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch. For all of these reasons, we think this cycle will last longer than those in the past, and don't see new hardware coming until 2011 at the earliest, and 2012 to 2013 more likely (if at all — if new services like OnLive take off, or if Xbox Live and PlayStation Network become more and more robust, there may not be a need for another console cycle).'"
An xbox wouldn't even last until 2015...
Have we really reached the point where "Good enough is"
Is the XBox 360/PS3 really the pinnacle of console gaming for the next 5 years?
With the Wii selling bucketloads more initially than anything else, despite having inferior graphics hardware, have the other two finally realised that Faster chips, bigger numbers and impressive specs are really just nothing more than macho posturing?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I'm still waiting for the price of a PS3 to come down to a ridiculous price, right now they have a ludicrous price.
"if new services like OnLive take off, or if Xbox Live and PlayStation Network become more and more robust, there may not be a need for another console cycle" --
How would great online service and downloadable content make up for the hardware staying the same? Thats like saying "Hey, we have the internet now: where people can download games and movies instead of going to the store to buy them. Lets just stop making faster CPU's and GPU's and let people be content with what they have."
I don't think I'll care about my PS3 having a motion sensor. I only play fighting games, Metal Gear Solid, and Ratchet & Clank. No real need or want for motion control from me. I have a Wii and I barely touch the thing anymore (wow I just typed that then paused then laughed) and won't until Mario Galaxy 2 comes out.
The reason my PS3 has longevity is because it plays Blu-Rays, it won the format war, and unless some new disc type comes along or digital downloads with all of the extra content of a BD come along my PS3 will be around for quite some time playing fighting games and serving as my BD player.
Motion control is just a gimmick and a casual consumer driven aspect of consoles. The life blood of gaming, less casual, more hardcore gamers, are the ones who play games like Oblivion, Unreal Tournament, Starcraft, Diablo, etc. because you aren't going to see companies like Blizzard all of the sudden shifting their entire focus to motion control games and fans aren't demanding it either. If SONY and MS are going to focus entirely on casual mommy daddy crowds and really young children then I will be trashing my consoles and going entirely back to PC gaming (aside from using my PS3 as a BD player and my Wii/360 as coasters).
Seriously, Chrono Trigger, God of War, Virtu Fighter, these games are long term titles and classics because they were built to me amazing from the ground up. People still play the SNES for Chrono Trigger. MS and SONY honestly think that motion controller = instant classics?
We saw Resident Evil 4 come out on the Wii with rave reviews for its new motion controlling scheme. And where did that put Resident Evil 5? Oh yeah on the 360 and PS3. Stop trying to steal Nintendo's kiddie and casual fan base and appeal to your more active crowd please SONY and MS.
Isn't the XBox 720 on the drawing board at Microsoft?
"he expects the Xbox 360 to last until around 2015" - I don't any 360 will last that long - they'll RROD themselves way before then!
If you consider the fact that most games are constantly looking for the latest and greatest, whether it be hardware or software or (god help us) controllers, there will be only negative results from the lengthening of the console lifecycle. By extending the life of these boxes, console manufacturers are going to face the waning interest of consumers.
In some respects, the decision to keep current consoles longer makes some sense. There has not been any serious change in gameplay since the earliest consoles from Nintendo came out (this is not perfectly true, but I'll come back to that later). In order to keep interest alive, more powerful consoles were needed to bring the graphics capabilities into sync with the gameplay. Now, with the latest batch of consoles, we have seen that level reached. There will still be a few more tweaks that could be applied: anti-aliasing is one technological hurdle that hasn't been tackled satisfactorily.
In effect, the development of consoles has been dictated by the needs of the games. Unfortunately, these games have needed better graphics more than anything else. So what we have now is the situation where graphics are really good, but gameplay has not improved.
Now to come back to the issue of gameplay. There have been only a few true quantum leaps in gameplay. 3D, independent cooperative gaming (as opposed to simple team-play which has been around since R-type), and the latest is motion control as introduced in the Wii. Motion control has been around a long time, but until Wii no one has been able to make it a success. Nintendo used to have a motion activated controller, but it never took off. Para Para Paradise was interesting, but very limited in scope and popularity. And though there were fighting games which attempted to use motion sensors for input, these were also widely criticized. It was the Wii which was able to break through the closed-mindedness and create games that were fun and realistic to the gaming world.
But what is next? What is the next quantum leap in gaming? Without it, there can't be any new consoles that do anything more than make graphics better. But if console manufacturers think that gamers are going to sit idly by twiddling their thumbs on old consoles, they are going to be in deep trouble. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's better for them to release new consoles, even if it means nothing more than better graphics. The alternative is to simply lose the interest of the gaming public.
Oh if only everyone in the console business were as stupid as to let the platform die a long slow horrible death for lack of hardware updates. PC gaming would reign unchallenged and everything would be good in the world.
I fear that is not the case, though. Consumers must be fleeced on a regular basis in exchange for "new" hardware, lest their wallets grow fat and constrict blood flow to their arses, prompting them to stand up and effectively removing them from the couch-dwelling demographic which is console gaming's core audience.
Just their way of saying "it took us a while, but we think we realized that higher polycounts and more visual effects alone don't make good games and don' sell consoles".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While Sony and Microsoft has largely lost money so far on their consoles Nintendo has made bucketloads, ney truckloads of money on the Wii. Nintendo can now upgrade their console up to par with Sony and Microsoft for a much smaller cost than Microsoft and Sony can upgrade theirs.
The big question i have is if Nintendo will focus on making the controls for Wii better and more accurate or if they have other gimmicks up their sleeve.
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The three general purpose cores (3.2GHz each) on X360 is what gives Microsoft the edge here. You can have Natal on core 2, your game on core 1 and system on core 3, everything runs smooth and relaxed. That means the extension like Natal can really be complex and well done. On PS3 you have only 1 general purpose core, that gives you some perspective of limited options.. This architectural advantage gives Microsoft headroom for future improvement.
Microsoft's Tech (impressive on reel, but lacking in meat-space) and Sony's Tech (impressive for tracking 1:1, but not for pointing) won't ever be able to reach the market penetration that the Wii has right now.
If you are a game company with a cool and fun game idea, and you want to use motion tech, you're going to pick the Wii, and motion plus if you need the extra precicion. The technology and packaged piece of hardware actually exists, is a dirt-cheap add-on to the system you already have, and will be hitting shelves in a month. The penetration won't be there with ~$80 for Natal, or for a PS3 camera + two tracking sticks (with tech inside equal to two Motion-plus Wiimotes).
It doesn't make any financial sense, and the odds of a software company making a compelling, core experience with these products in the first place is plain silly.
When a company is designing a game, one of the first decisions they make is definitely not "how can we limit the reach of our product to as few customers as possible?".
Back in 2004 Nintendo were famously going to extend the GC life cycle with new peripherals for the forseeable future, including a mysterious EyeToy rival. Said peripheral, presumably, turned into the Wii controller. So obviously this is an idea that's been considered in the past. I guess the GC seemed too aged, at the time, for them to actually go through with that.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The reason there's no new hardware from the console maker is that there is no new hardware from the chip makers. We hit the GHz ceiling a couple years ago, and as a result today's chips aren't better by enough to make it worthwhile.
I suspect MS and Sony want to see where the multi-core thing is going (CPUs support a dozen complex threads, while GPUs support a few hundred simple threads.) Will one line of chips take over the other? Will we find masses of simple cores are better than a few complex cores? Or will we find it's worth keeping a few complex cores on every chip?
Once we (or at least our researchers) can see where this is going, then the next-gen hardware development will start up again.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Let's see:
No, they're not going to start over from scratch. The cost of starting a new hardware platform is sufficiently high that they'll build upon their existing platforms in an evolutionary way, given how much red ink the MS and Sony platforms have bled. More powerful GPUs, more powerful CPUs (probably a higher core count, maybe a clock speed bump, possibly the return of out of order execution for the PS3 and Xbox's successor, more RAM, and maybe higher capacity media (almost certainly for the Xbox, possibly not for the PS3.)
Uh ... guys ... look at the hardware release cycle in the past. Five to six years. When did these consoles come out? 2005, 2006? Wouldn't that make it 2011? Sheesh.
My feeling is that the first to the block with a new hardware platform will be Nintendo. The Wii was a very careful balancing act: more power than the Gamecube, but not so much as to push the initial costs into the stratosphere. They'll almost certainly do the same for the Wii's successor. Backwards compatibility with the Wii is pretty much certain. Gamecube compatibility? Maybe, but they may drop it to save a few bucks. Multi core? Perhaps, but it'll be multi core in the same way that desktop CPUs are multi core: full blown out of order execution, rather than sticking to strict in-order execution to cut down on the transistor count. More powerful GPU (possibly full HD compatibility this time, certainly 720p at a minimum.) More RAM. The usual list. What's going to be interesting with the Wii's successor will be what they end up doing with interfacing - Nintendo have always pushed the boundaries in their controllers, whilst Microsoft and Sony follow along behind.
After a year or two, maybe three, of Nintendo's new platform being on the market, we'll see Microsoft and Sony upgrade their systems. Or maybe they'll just throw new controllers at them and keep the existing hardware platform the same, which would mean that their "upgrades" would come much sooner than otherwise would be the case.
In any case, the winners will be the customers (in that more grunt comes at a lower price), and the losers will be the gaming studios as they try to cope with the demands inherent in developing for more powerful systems.
Both Microsoft and Sony can create faster variants of their existing hardware, but mandate that new games are backward compatible.
As can Nintendo. Most Game Boy Color games early in the GBC's lifetime could display in grayscale on a Game Boy Pocket, and Nintendo has stated that some new DS games will have extra capabilities when inserted into a Nintendo DSi system of the correct region.
Maybe this time they will have time to come down in price enough for me to actually be able to afford to buy one of each before the next generation comes around.
The hardware is good enough for good games. It has been since the Commodore 64.
Could the Commodore 64 have run a first-person shooter like the Doom or Quake or Unreal series in real time? (Probably not; no 3D rasterizing hardware nor sufficiently fast CPU.) Could the Nintendo Entertainment System have run a social simulator like The Sims or Animal Crossing? (Probably not; enough battery-backed RAM on a cartridge to save the state of a town was cost prohibitive during the NES's commercial era.)
you dont seem to understand that about 70% of households do not have a hdtv. that entire arguement is moot. my wii is hooked up thru an rf modulator still. not everyone has the kind of cash for the newest hardware(consoles) and displays to keep up with their shinyness. what it comes down to is gameplay and fun. sure the ps3 is real slick hardware, but i cant afford one, and i dont really see more than a handful of games i'd really be interested in. the 360... well its a m$ product and i wouldnt play it if you gave me one, the controller is awkward and they charge you to play online. sure they have a bunch of great titles but 70% of those have pc versions, which is always the best platform. if someone would/could settle on a good hardware system for the consoles then there would be a no-brainer must have. but using the special chips they produce for these things like they are now is crazy costly. they(360) might have had it right this time around, if they didnt take cost cutting measures and put out crap hardware. the ideal console would be 100% backwards compatible because it is just updated hardware to the previous generation, like gc/wii. instead of spending millions making some weird propriety code/chip every 7-8years upgrading a building ontop of what you have would keep costs down and the players happy. but what do i know ive only been gaming for 24 of my 26years on earth.
why m$ and sony think their rabid consumers would go for motion control, i havent a clue. wouldnt those people already own a wii?
was there not research showing that the attach rate (i.e. frequency of game buying) was very much lower for casual/Wii gamers?
Does this include only retail titles or also VC and WiiWare games purchased with Wii Points?
Why can't your computer be powered partly by a bicycle wheel, while the computer monitors your exercise and requests power from time to time? Don't pedal when the computer tells you to, and your computer shuts down.
Good luck keeping up the pedaling long enough to finish downloading the 8 GB game you bought. Or are you talking about a mass migration away from desktop PCs and 150-watt consoles in favor of machines that sip power like laptops and Wii consoles?
The reason there's no new hardware from the console maker is that there is no new hardware from the chip makers. We hit the GHz ceiling a couple years ago, and as a result today's chips aren't better by enough to make it worthwhile.
This is a myth. The clock speed of a processor isn't directly indicative of its performance, which has never stopped increasing.
Each core in a Core i7, at 2.66Ghz, is faster than a whole 3.8Ghz Pentium 4 and uses a quarter of the power. There's no tradeoff between core count and speed, modern CPUs have both.
I don't any 360 will last that long - they'll RROD themselves way before then!
I imagine that the Xbox 360 won't last that long, but a hypothetical Xbox 360 Slimline with the same capability as Xbox 360 might last the rest of the time.
On PS3 you have only 1 general purpose core
The hypervisor in PS3 Other OS runs on a SPE core, not the general purpose core. I'd imagine that the new motion control system could likewise have an SPE dedicated to it.
Back in 2004 Nintendo were famously going to extend the GC life cycle with new peripherals for the forseeable future
And they did. One of the additions to the GameCube family was a revision with the same general architecture and four new features: more RAM, an overclocked CPU, a USB port, and an internal flash chip. This revised GameCube is called Wii. Even the Bluetooth radio that talks to the Wii Remotes sits on an internal USB port. The Nintendo DSi bears much the same relationship to the DS: more RAM, a faster CPU, an SD card slot, and an internal flash chip.
Now that the consoles are getting upgradeable, with downloadable content, upgradeable hard drives, etc. you can upgrade quite a bit of the console, to keep up with the ever increasing game needs. And where in the recent cycles consoles became outdated largely as new game storage media became available, and games required more and more data, now the consoles have the ability to store the game, in part or in whole, on its own hard drive.
The only thing I see that might replace the current consoles soon would be a modular system that could fully upgrade memory, video hardware, control devices, etc.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Motion controls are NOT lengthening the current console life cycle. That wasn't implied in the article and the notion itself is absurd. Analyst believe that because the console makers are devoting significant time and effort to producing new hardware for consoles that will be 3-4 years old by the time that hardware is released, it is a sign the console makers are planning on stretching out the usual console life cycle. Motion detection is not the cause. Motion detection hardware is being shown as evidence of a hypothesis that at least Sony has publicly confirmed long ago: video game consoles will be released at a slower pace than previously.
With the recent demonstrations of new 640K RAM computers, analysts now expect the current computer generation to last longer than normal. Signal Hill's Todd Greenwald thinks this cycle may not need to end at all: "Microsoft and Sony have invested so much in their current hardware line, as have third party publishers, that we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch. For all of these reasons, we think this cycle will last longer than those in the past, and don't see new hardware coming until 2011 at the earliest, and 2012 to 2013 more likely if at all, there may not be a need for another computer cycle."
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As I see it the sensible next gen console step for MS and Sony is to just expand on their current technology rather than starting again from scratch and waiting 1-2 years for Developers to catch up.
If Sony's PS4 was a PS3 with 2 cell chips and latest Nvidia Graphics (say 260 derived) and the Xbox (3?) upgraded to a 6-8 core power PC chip from the current 3 core device with latest generation ATI graphics (derived form their latest DirectX11 chip) then maintaining backwards comaptibility should be relatively straight forward compared to the present v last generation (where both Sony and MS changed graphics chip technology and CPU technology). As such all the SDK and debug tools could be carried over in an updated form. Developers could hit the ground running....
>... we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch.
Man, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo did a hardware refresh in a year or so and called it a next generation machine? They could make it backwards compatible to the Wii, have simultaneous releases for both systems, but distract Sony and MS to no end. But would it be the Wii2, or the WiiII (or Wiii)?
Commodore 64 [had] no 3D rasterizing hardware nor sufficiently fast CPU.
The original Doom didn't use hardware 3D
I know Doom used software rendering on an i486 or high-end i386DX CPU. But that's not so easy on a MOS Technology 6510 CPU clocked at 1 MHz.
Also, I'd count Flight Simulator in as a 3D game. The original one by Bruce Artwick ran on Commodore, Atari, 8088 PCs, etc. And the 3D in that was only one step down from what was in Doom
But could the C64's CPU handle complex enough enemy meshes at high enough frame rate to make a twitch shooter like Quake 3 Arena?
I think another important thing to think about is that the economic problems we're having right now are going to stop people from buying a new console, if any company was going to put one out.
Really, It would just be suicide to try to make a PS4 right now.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Do people really expect this to take off any time soon? Do you realize the infrastructure that's going to be needed to be deployed regionally to make this work? In it's current state is nearly maxes out a basic cable connection. I just don't foresee it becoming standard any time soon.
From what we keep reading, we haven't even seen what the PS3 is really capable of. We keep hearing about games being made for Xbox360 then ported to PS3, with the Xbox360 being the baseline, etc.
Also, with the new Metroid game, we finally see what the Wii is capable of and it's far from cartoony graphics.
In any case, what matters is games and how far can developers push the hardware. I have a Wii for Zelda and Metroid games, and I'll probably be getting a PS3 to play FF XIV Online. I sure hope I can transfer my character from FF XI Online...
Yes, but it took us 3 years just to reach "faster". Back in the 90s, you could expect to get double the usable performance in less than two years. We should have had chips running running 2-4 times faster than they are now, but instead Intel has spent half the decade releasing 3 GHz chips, each one merely "faster" than the previous (except for the ones that are slower.) And it's all due to the GHz ceiling.
Well, *I* call it the GHz ceiling. I suppose a more technical name might be "leakage-induced thermal limit."
And the whole reason we have multi-core processors is due to the GHz limit. I'd rather have one 6 GHz core than two at 3 GHz. But we can't get one to run at 6 GHz no matter how small we make it, so the only way to boost performance is it with multiple cores.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Meh - my grandmother is faster than a Pentium 4, and only uses cups of tea for power.
which is totally what she said
But we can't get one to run at 6 GHz no matter how small we make it, so the only way to boost performance is it with multiple cores.
It's not though. You can do a lot without increasing the clock frequency; more cores are one thing, but modern CPUs also perform much more instructions per clock, have larger caches and in some cases onboard memory controllers. These all help performance a lot.
As for the slower high end advancement, I think it's more due to lack of competition than lack of technology. It's only very recently that AMD have become competitive even with Intel's C2D series. They've been competing on price. In the high end they have nothing, so Intel has no incentive to bring out faster chips there.
I'm fairly sure they have the capability though. I mean, check out the overclocking capabilities of their chips; you can get an entire extra Ghz out of them sometimes and 500 to 600Mhz extra is pretty much a given with any Core 2. They've already got a 3.5Ghz chip with a 65W TDP in the form of the E8700. People are willing to put up with TDPs of 130W if the performance is there so it looks like Intel have a fairly high ceiling they can expand into if necessary.
Maybe I'm alone, but I own a Wii and a 360. The Wii is fun for 5 minutes and then gets very very boring. The Xbox has games that are fun for hours at a time.
So why does everyone just assume the Wii is more fun? Because it moved more consoles? That's no better a metric than # of games sold, which the Wii loses at pretty badly.
I absolutely agree with the article. If they decide to go motion control, then my current console will last me as long as they continue manufacturing it because I have no interest in upgrading to motion control.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you pull my other leg it plays Jingle Bells.
Seriously, anyway I can get paid to take obvious generalities and make baseless predictions? 2011 at the earliest, oh god it's as if there's a six year console cycle! No one could ever have predicted that, no siree.
Wii Sports comes with every single console. I'm pretty sure you don't buy it sepretly. Also, Wii Play comes with a free wiimote bundled with it. So I think with Wii Play most people buy it since it's only $10 more than a Wii-Mote by itself. And lastly Wii Fit. Again that's not really a game. I think people buy that one so they can work out with their nintendo.
I'd rather have one 6 GHz core than two at 3 GHz.
Really? The Pentium 4 can be OCed to 6GHz with a bit of effort - knock yourself out.
Don't expect it to run anywhere near as fast as a 3GHz i7 though.
we've had 1st person shooters since the late 90's and The Sims since 2000 & Sandbox gameplay since 1999 (Shenmue). As far as I see it's been 10 years since hardware's enabled new forms of gameplay. I haven't seen anything new in this generation. At least the PS2 gen felt like it was perfecting what was started with the PS1. This gen just feels like a rehash. Heck, even the Wii is just the Powerglove with more sensors.
oh yes, a motion detector is going to magicly make the consoles last longer.
um, how about the high cost to make the consoles? Or the longer development time for games?
Or how about when everyone in the USA gets FIOS (even though comcast is trying to keep us copper connected), and we actually have some decent latencies, gaming can end up being played on big ass servers somewhere and streamed to your console?
The current generation of consoles are probably going to be the last because they are too expensive.
Be seeing you...