Slashdot Mirror
The 5-Year Console Cycle Is Dead
Pickens writes "The Xbox 360 recently turned five years old, and with no known successor on the horizon for the 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii, Cnet reports on the death of the 5-year console cycle — one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now, why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers."
When even the latest and greatest 3D TVs only go up to 1080p and the vast majority of people playing games at 720p max who is going to buy a next gen console for a screen size that does not exist.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It was over 7 years between the famicom and the super famicom, the gap is shorter in the US because Nintendo waited 2 years to start selling the famicom(NES) in the US.
Monstar L
Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away.
The business model has changed in a way which makes 5-year-console-cycles less important. It used to be turning out a new console would give you new capabilities AND would get people to buy lots of new games. Now you may get a little more power and may be able to upgrade the way a few things are done, but more of your revenue stream comes from subscriptions than from new game or new console sales. (New console sales are actually a net negative, at least for some of the major providers, because they keep the lost low to encourage sales of the games and recoup the loss on games + subscriptions.)
Also, the technology of game platforms isn't advancing quickly enough any more to make a five-year-lag a competition killer.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers"
That and because most PC games are crippled so they can also run on consoles (or are ports of comparitively cripppled console games), thereby leaving most of their computing power idle.
Game studios and developers probably put some pressure too. Having to program for yet another console gets expensive and complicated. Instead of having to learn new hardware, they can continue expanding the tech behind the software.
How awkward.
--
Madonna is SEXY! I LOVE MADONNA!!!
People aren't as willing to buy and dispose of consoles, just to get the "latest and greatest". I think the success of the Wii has also shown that there is a market for just "fun" games, rather than just relying on graphical eye candy. In addition, with the Sony Move and Microsoft Kinect, in some ways these consoles are new enough.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I think it could simply be that people realized that they didn't need to buy new systems to play (more) decent games. The manufacturers saw that they were certainly not making ANY significant amounts of profit of the hardware, and the existing hardware (PS2 for example) just wouldn't DIE, as developers just kept pumping out games for them. Why waste money in bringing new systems when no revitalization is needed in the industry? These are businesses after all. They won't try to fix what 'aint broke.
And the Kinect is just a new controller for the 360.
You're aware that the Kinect is not a standalone console, right?
It's an add-on peripheral for the XBOX 360.
And this is news why ? Sony and MS both have said repeatedly the next generation likely won't come about until around 2012 or so.
I'm sorry, but I can't handle 8800GT-era graphics anymore. The 360 used to look nice, but it's definitely aging, and Microsoft seems intent on going down the casual-gamer road. I started buying more titles on PC than console last year, and I've only purchased a handful this year. I know that I'm in the minority, but this supposed "10-year cycle" is just not for me.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Why would any company want to compete on the level that they did these past five years (excluding the Wii)?
Sony and Microsoft, pushing forward with their loss leaders.. only just now starting to etch out a good portion of the market that they're actually making money.
Of course, even after all this time, it still deserves to be said how amazingly the Wii massacred the other two. Though.. now that MS and Sony have a more.. non-hardcore offering, where will this lead them?
Only time will tell, and interesting it will be, either way!
[Full disclosure: The only modern system I own is the Wii.]
Nintendo seems to be the only one that needs to upgrade the capabilities of their current console. There's lots of games coming out for PS3 or XBox360 that I'd like to play, but these games are not coming out on the Wii because it's simply not powerful enough. I may pick up one of the other ones used after Christmas - not because I can't afford them new, but because I don't want my money going to the prop up companies that approve of DRM laden software and sue people for modding the hardware they sell.
Sony may have some hardware issues that need to be fixed, and Microsoft's XBox360 has some very well-known issues that should be fixed - and the next generation of the XBox series including a BD-ROM drive would be a nice touch. But as someone else mentioned, current-gen consoles can max out the resolution of most (HD)TVs that are out there, so why put a bunch of money into R&D that isn't going to affect the end experience that much?
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Another factor is updatable firmware and OS over the internet. The console makers of this generation can fix bugs and add whole new capabilities that they could not do prior to this generation. Think of how Sony has kept the PS3 updated as a blu-ray player with compatibility fixes, adding lossless audio, 3D support, etc. Or how all the console makers have added Netflix streaming client capabilities, something that wasn't even on the horizon when these models were designed. Or how Sony and Microsoft were able to add motion control abilities. All this adds of to being able to extend the life of the current generation in ways that would have required a whole new platform before.
A good follow-up question would be: what astounding new capabilities would it take to motivate a next-gen console?
The Wii was just a new controller for the gamecube
It's more likely that the reason is profitability on these consoles. Other than Nintendo who released a comparatively less powerful device that was largely an evolution of the technology used in their previous generation console, Sony and Microsoft sunk a lot of money into developing the consoles and then heavily subsidized the initial costs of the devices in order to sell more of them. Microsoft also took a big hit due to quality issues with the initial version of the console which had a high failure rate due to design or manufacturing flaws.
There's no way either Sony or Microsoft could afford to release another console at this point. They both threw a lot of money at trying to beat each other without any success on either side. Microsoft could easily keep pouring money down the Xbox pit, but eventually investors will want the venture to show a profit. Sony's little empire has been eroding on all sides and they can't commit the resources to release a new console so they're stuck as well. Nintendo doesn't seem to care and it content selling Wii's for what must be a fairly ludicrous profit at this point.
Nintendo it likely to be the first to release something new, but I don't foresee them following in Microsoft or Sony's strategy. They'll probably release something comparable to the Xbox 360 or PS3 and price it such that they profit from each device sold. This would also put them in a position where more third party games can be ported to the system without a degradation in quality.
Sony and Microsoft are likely to stick with this generation for at least another two years. It probably depends how well Kinect and Move end up doing in the market. They both seem to have done better than I expected so it could be three or more years. Once they start to fall flat I imagine that they'll start moving towards something new. But they're in this position because they spent a lot of money to be the best, only to end up getting blindsided by Nintendo who realized that the game Sony and Microsoft were playing would be suicide.
the downturn in the economy has claimed consoles as a victim, which a lot of people are not sad about.
Just one more generation and we'll finally have a true HD console (one rendering at 1920x1080, not scaling up from a much lower rez). I don't want to build another gaming computer. Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
... take too long to make today because hardware power has increased asset production time exponentially. So it's obvious why console generations are no longer 5 years, its pretty much approaching 3+ years between a game and its sequel.
Doing a modern AAA game takes at lest 3 or more years to do it right, and games that are developed in 2 years often show it in lack of quality and the use of rehashed concepts ad-nauseum.
Not to mention all the money and years spent wasted in failed attempts and false starts that is hidden from view.
Sorry, I forgot to mention I'm not a doofus.
And of course you're aware the Kinect remakes and reinvigorates the 360 market, right?
Considering all of the things consoles can do (watch movies, browse the internet, online play, etc.) the only thing that's left is to just turn them into PCs.
Didn't you see the commercials? Kinect is not the controller, you are the controller....
Disclaimer: I'm not actually from the future. This my best guess
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http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
It really sucks, and is not getting much better anytime soon. New consoles are very expensive, and a $150 - $200 controller + game combo is a much easier investment than $400 + games + misc crap you end up buying with a new console (e.x: they rarely come with the cables you want). Don't forget that retailers love to throw mandatory bundles at early adopters. So a new console can easily cost between $500 - $600 after all is said and done.
Then you've got to consider the economics of the hardware itself. Both the 360 and PS3 took a while to become anything but money sinks. A lot longer than many expected (more so in the case of the 360). While the original Xbox was surprisingly solid and well-designed, if bulky, the 360 was rushed through development. It was released with a lot of stupid, stupid, stupid design flaws that took forever to deal with. Apparently the key people that made the good decisions in '99 - '01 weren't around to prevent the money-losing disaster that was the 360. (Side note: The lack of a standard hard drive was to me, the first sign that Redmond had bungled the project on the managerial level, and bad things were on the horizon)
The PS3 was designed to get Blu-Ray into your living room, and consequently, the initial cost was absolutely absurd. Sony's response amounted to "Deal with it. You'll pay it."
People largely didn't. It took a while for the platform to pick up steam.
The Cell processor didn't become the industry-changing force Sony hoped. Sure, IBM uses it for some stuff, but the development costs weren't amortized over multiple platforms to the degree Sony had imagined. It was supposed to show up in all sorts of consumer electronics, but that never happened. They even offered the chip to Apple when it was getting ready to ditch the PowerPC, and Steve Jobs turned them down for technical reasons.
By now the Xbox 360 hardware has been stabilized - the bugs finally squashed. The 360 and PS3 have been value-engineered to be much cheaper to build. Both Sony and Microsoft are finally able to make the kind of money they were hoping to rake in a long time ago. While new consoles are undoubtably under development, Microsoft and Sony's investors are probably not interested in them losing tons more on another launch in a crappy economy.
.... to make certain components of those systems upgradeable. say, like cpu. say, memory. say, maybe gpu. even if the upgrades would be limited, they would still allow more wiggle room for the console owners, and also help progress of both gaming and consoles with new generation upgradeable items. because the items would only bring processing power/memory/whatever, it wouldnt require any significant changes.
they could use oem parts, they could do their chips themselves. in any case, they would be able to sell more frequently, rather than the spikes they are having every release, and then dying out.
and that would help the gaming progress faster than it is doing now. we are all waiting 5 year cycles of consoles to catch up to go up a notch even in pc gaming, because all developers have to accommodate consoles too.
Read radical news here
Is it possible that a down economy won't support a new offering in the numbers necessary to be defined a success? Why put out a console in the middle of a recession? You'd just have to deal with all the slashdot articles saying it didn't sell as well as the last model, which was introduced in boom times.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I know it's supposed to sound dramatic but it just comes across as sensationalistic and trite.
I have no citation, but I remember when the PS3 first came out, Sony admitted to having a 10 year cycle. I was skeptical at the time, but it looks like they'll blow past 5 years at least.
-- My Sig is a P228.
Take a look at how long games are taking to make nowadays, a couple of examples being GT5 and FFXIII.
They probably needed to slow down the release of new consoles to prevent "Duke Nukem Forever Syndrome" where nobody would release their games because there'd always be new technology just around the corner.
The obvious answer is that console makers have realized that a significant amount of people aren't willing to plunk down $300 on a new console with the job market the way it is. Any new console represents a major investment in the development, and fragments your current set of developers and buyers into two markets for a number of years. With nobody willing to stick their neck out, but at the same time each having a profitable piece of the existing market, why risk future sales to anyone holding off for the next thing?
Brilliant. Why do I need a console hooked to my television when the cloud can magically render high performance 3D graphics on my television?
Evolution: love it or leave it
An upgrade to a PS4 now would cost huge amounts to develop, would have to be sold at a loss, wouldn't offer an immediate and significant improvement in graphics or gameplay, and would be followed by a new offering from Microsoft and Nintendo fairly quickly. And most of all, the success of the Wii showed that you don't need the biggest processor to make money.
Personally I see two paths to the next generation. One is a game that can't be made 3D without either a hardware upgrade or a graphics downgrade, combined with a super-secret new console that we don't hear about until it's almost on the shelves. Obviously won't happen until 3D TV's are common. The other is the Wii being pushed to slightly above 360/PS3 hardware levels, with a price similar to current PS3/360 prices. The former path is probably more likely and will result in a higher-quality next generation, the latter would probably deal a serious blow to the nextgen Microsoft and Sony offerings. I suppose if neither happens in the next few years a more typical generation movement would happen.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
The hell it was. Gamecube and Wii used different media formats, different input device busses, different CPU, different GPU.
Gamecube GPU - ATI "Flipper", 162 MHz
Wii GPU - ATI "Hollywood", 243 MHz
Gamecube CPU - IBM PowerPC "Gekko", 486 MHz
Wii CPU - IBM PowerPC-based "Broadway, 729 MHz
The real reason is probably that the PS3 and Xbox360 were a bit ahead of their time -- they both cost too much (except for early adopters), and were HD at a time where the installed base of HDTV was pretty much limited to early adopters. As the consumer space has caught up, and the manufacturers have cut costs, they are now taking over the Wii-dominated market. In other words, the next generation is already here.
Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away.
If you turn 360 degrees, you are then facing the same direction you started out. If you then started walking after turning 360 degrees you would be walking the same direction you faced when you started turning - which in this case would probably be right into the XBox 360 that you are trying to avoid.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think most of the innovation is in the hand held arena these days. New markets often get the focus of developers and manufacturers for awhile, but I think in time we'll circle back to consoles as graphics, processing, and sensing technologies improve.
What the Wii showed Microsoft, Sony, and everyone else is that polygons per second and screen resolution are not the major determinants of success. The Wii succeeded by having an innovative controller, and well-designed casual games. Equating platform competitiveness with fast hardware is an incorrect association, at least right now.
So Microsoft and Sony are doing the rational thing and investing their R&D into new controllers and good games, rather than a new platform rev. Given the risks they'll probably want to defer a major platform upgrade as long as they can, until performance is borderline painful.
When the 360 and the PS3 came out with half a gig each, shared between the GPU and CPU, who truly thought that would be enough?
If new consoles were made today, we'd see 2GB minimum. Maybe 4. That's about what it takes to avoid cutting corners.
Backward compatibility would be a lot easier to come by, though. Just have the PS3 hardware in the PS4 as a physics unit and the XBox 360 hardware in the XBox WTF serving the same purpose.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
a PS3 already? I've been waiting for years for a good price drop (like to $200), but this news is not encouraging. I pretty much only like racing and RPGs so I'm not sure what I would play besides GT5 (maybe Yakuza, that was pretty fun on the PS2)
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
You are aware you also by an Xbox with the Kinect built in as well? Jeez, my ass is in the 3rd world and I know that.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
There's lots of games coming out for PS3 or XBox360 that I'd like to play, but these games are not coming out on the Wii because it's simply not powerful enough
The Wii is actually a reasonably powerful system in terms of CPU/GUP/ etc, in spite of the fact that it outputs at 480p. I suspect a bigger part of why a lot of games don't come out for the Wii comes down to the most distinctive element of the system - the controller itself. PS3/Xbox360 controllers have what, 40 buttons on them? The Wii controller has about 7 buttons (not including the D pad). Even if you include the nunchuck the total button count just isn't there and the programmers find that a significant hindrance. A lot of games expect players to instinctively be able to pull of 4 button combos with specific sequences of other presses on either side of the combo; that simply doesn't work with the Wiimote because there aren't enough buttons to do it.
That said, if the Wiimote gained another dozen buttons in the next iteration they would likely lose some of the distinctive market segments that the Wii opened up - older and younger people.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's the Principle of Good Enough in action. A technology gets to a certain point where it meets most user's requirements, and from then the cost and effort of upgrading mostly outweighs any benefit. It's the same reason Windows XP is still around, the same reason flying cars will never work. When you find what you are looking for, you stop looking.
I feel abused and mistreated by Sony. Sony demonstrated to me a solid record of not admitting to any hardware defects and not standing behind just-out-of-warranty hardware that died multiple deaths. Customer contact policy is beyond condescending. Their next console could be the best in the universe, the aggravation will never be worth it.
Not there's a snowball's chance I would buy from Microsoft either. As far as I'm concerned this is the end of the line for consoles in my home, period. I fondly hope that the PC gaming scene will get out from under the dead hand of Microsoft in time to pick up the slack. If not, I have better things to do with my time.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Let me check the date. Yep, still 2010, four years after the Wii came out. Wikipedia says the Playstation came out in 1994, PS2 in 2000, and PS3 in 2006, so we shouldn't expect a PS4 until 2012. Doesn't the summary contradict itself?
But wait, the Xbox came out in 2001 and Xbox 360 in 2005. Where is my Xbox 720???
Neo Geo (console)
It lasted from 1990 to 2007. Not bad!
The funny thing about being more than a generation behind the latest and greatest is you still get to be impressed by the 'new' graphics, but the games are dirt cheap. I suppose once I break down and get an hdtv I may want a PS3 or whatever. But if they are going to drag their feet bringing out the PS4 then that will keep the price of the PS3 up and thus I won't get one. The games will still be new to me whenever I get it.
While the Wii uses a mere 18 Watts or so, the PS 3 and Xbox 360 use well over 100, (earlier models can be closer to 200). If one wants to use the device for watching video, it's certainly worth comparing the Apple TV which uses less than 6 Watts. Streaming from a PC, particularly one with a power hungry GPU card, adds considerably to the consumption.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
In areas where power costs about $.13 per kw/h, every 10 Watts used full time runs about $1/month.
Do the math, it really adds up. (Of course more consumption affects the environment more too)
The savings from using an energy efficient setup could cover the cost of new hardware or some paid content.
Power used becomes heat which was a major factor in the 360s' (especially early units) being very unreliable. Monitors/TVs use significant power too, especially with larger screens. Plasma is generally much worse than LCD.
When the consoles are not enormously more powerful than some people's laptops or older desktops, I think a spec bump should be on the horizon.
Did the red ring mess slow down the next xbox?
I know I'm not alone in the hope that all of this fanfare over games that have "great graphics" (which seems to be a term that defies definition and can refer to anything from resolution to polygon count to the extent of shading) will come to an end as the realism in games starts to encroach on the uncanny valley. Once that happens, I also hope that we'll see the companies competing on other virtues, as opposed to graphics, just as we've seen printer manufactures start competing with features other than raw dpi, and camera manufacturers competing with functionality beyond mere megapixels. Ideally, they'll start competing on the basis of something worthwhile, such as, oh, I don't know, GAMEPLAY, but I have no doubt that they'll find other meaningless numbers that they can continue to increase for years to come, just as I have no doubt that we'll hear various fanboys telling us about how many more jiggabits or flopperwits their system can do than the other ones (and I wish I was making up "jiggabits", but I actually had someone use that term in all seriousness when talking to me once).
In any technology market, innovation stops as soon as Microsoft wrests control of market leadership.
Did Clark really say that? Well he probably said something like it in private, back in '94-96.
That's totally untrue. The new 360s have a dedicated port for the Kinect, but it's not built in by any measure. Only difference is that the new port eliminates the need to plug the Kinect camera in to a separate power source.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
These antiquated consoles are actually holding back game advancement. All we get on the PC now are console caliber graphics. Sure, you can buy a motherfucker Nvidia card for your PC, but it's pointless because the games aren't evolving to match. There was a time when PC versions of games had better graphics, but they just aren't putting in the effort anymore.
For example, a new game like Call of Duty Black Ops doesn't have much better graphics than previous titles like Modern Warfare 2 or even older ones like World at War and COD 4 for that matter.
We keep getting more iterations of the same shit and game publishers are getting away with it.
I'm done buying games for a while, I've been disappointed with current titles. (Other than Black Ops, which has a lot to like, despite just "good" but mediocre graphics)
We need another Crysis to give hardware a kick in the ass.
I think it's because it takes so long to develop games for the latest generation of consoles, that it took several years for the PS3 and XBOX 360 to have any good titles. The Wii is unique in that the software was simpler and Wii Sports made it fun from day one. But PS3 was really a tough sell. When it came out all you could play was this silly truck racing game that wasn't fun compared to PS2 games and didn't even look that cool. We're just starting to see some good games for PS3 in the last year or two. For the next generation of consoles they should try to release some kind of developer kit years in advance.
Doesn't kinect have all the magnitude of a launch? And the Move also.
A "gigabit" is a perfectly valid measure of data (it's an eighth of a gigabyte), and the pronunciation "jigga" for that particular SI prefix is obscure but not incorrect. It typcially measures data transfer rates but it could measure other things as well.
As someone who wrote and implemented OpenGL on the Wii and shipped 2 Wii games that used it, actually, you and the GP are both right, and wrong.
The Wii was Gamecube x2. Meaning in the Real-World it was twice as fast. Check the Nintendeo forums where Jack Matthews benchmarks the performance (especially memory.)
Nintendo DIDN'T fix _any_ of the hardware GPU rendering bugs in the Wii, which is why the derogatory Gamecube is applicable.
Cheers
Kinect is not the controller, you are the controller....
Normally one has to pay for a controller. How much is Microsoft willing to pay me to be the controller?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
So, it's a speed bump? Yep, whole new machine.
Why would Sony introduce a PS4 while the PS2 is still selling? For crying out loud, GT5 only just came out! That would have to mean GT6 would be a "launch" title for the PS4 (e.g. 4 years after launch).
At the moment, the PS3 is the one console that is yet to be pushed to its limits. The other two are very close already, with little room to improve.
I actually think the end of a generation is where the best games are released: Metal Gear Solid 3, God of War I & II. It seems a shame to drop an entire knowledge-base and shift to a new platform (as we all knkow Sony would do). Then it would take another 4 years before the machine's limits could be properly exploited.
So, what we need right now is a "0.5" generation, all new fully backward-compatible machines, but with extra horsepower to keep up with PC hardware. But it seems Nintendo is the only one concerned with compatibility.
It is a 5ish year cycle, not 5 on the nose. Some console releases took longer, some were faster. For example the NES actually launched July of 1983, the SNES November of 1990. They were both launched a bit later in the US, but those are the dates of hardware launch. That's over 7 years. The Sega Master System launched October 1985, the Megadrive (Genesis) in October of 1998 so only 3 years there.
5 years is not a maxim, it is an approximate. About every 5 years the companies that are making consoles made new ones in the past. Varies by a couple of years though.
So the next generation? Well who knows. As you noted the 360 came out in 2005, it was the first launch of this generation. If they keep that up, one would expect another one in the next year or two. Of course there may be more delays. Part of it is just that consoles are pretty good these days. They have nice graphics by most standards, they are on the Internet, etc. There's not a pressing need to upgrade. Part of it is of course the economy is sucking, a new product launch might not be a wonderful idea right now.
However another part may be HD adoption. Right now all consoles require games to support SD. It was necessary when they launched, HDTVs were too rare to mandate. However they've been on a big upswing, and it would be real nice for game design if they could require a higher rez. That'd allow for more refined UI elements and so on. However for that, might need to wait a bit. Your product needs to be one that most consumers have the necessary gadgets to be able to use.
If there are no new consoles in 2 more years, and no news, well then I'll say "Ya, something odd is going on, they are sandbagging on purpose to milk money out of their current generation." However at this point? I would bet they are in early design stages. They aren't going to say anything because who knows what'll change for the final product, but they are probably looking at what they want for the next gen. I would bet in 2 years time we see them.
Remember that the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and the earliest anything was talked about was 2003, and that was only to developers to get initial support for the platform. It isn't like they go with big announcements as soon as they start work, they don't want to damage sales on the existing consoles.
It's a speed bump, and a whole new controller!!!
Kid-proof tablet..
I'm very aware of the gigabit as a unit of measure, since I have to use it quite frequently in my graduate research (this is slashdot, after all...I'd hope most of us know what a gigabit is). That said, even if we excuse the pronunciation (and, though I was unaware of it previously, you're right, it is acceptable, but it's fallen out of general use), this person used it as if it were a singular number that represented the performance of their PC as a whole. They most certainly weren't referring to anything that could reasonably be measured with gigabits. And, in the context of my previous post, I just needed a stand-in for a future buzzword. It fit the bill, so I stand by its use.
To be honest, I'm wondering when somebody is going to have the bright idea to offer an upgraded video card as part of the console.
Game Boy Color, late 1990s. GBC-aware games were run with an 8.4 MHz 8080-family CPU (was 4.2 MHz), 32 KiB of RAM (was 8 KiB), 16 KiB of VRAM (was 8 KiB), and up to 56 colors on a screen (usually around 32 unique colors in practice due to tile edge limitations).
Wii, mid-2000s. Hardware-wise, the console is a GameCube with more TEVs (multitexture stages on the GPU), more RAM, a 50% faster CPU, and a Bluetooth radio for communication with a Wii Remote.
That has to be one of the best dying businesses around.
As I understand it, you claim a $300 PC with a $100 video card is competitive with a $300 PS3, and modern TVs can display PC video. In that case, why are some genres, such as fighting games and local-multiplayer "party" minigame collections, sorely underrepresented on PC?
ROFL! Sorry to blow your hypothesis, Slashdot!
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/11/kinect-sells-25m-in-25-days-consumers-are-the-controller.ars
we get new systems when the old ones hardware cant preform anymore. when ps3 and 360 came out they released bleeding edge hardware multicore systems. heck even in the pc world where still only using 2 cores. the 360 has 3. so any new system atm would dimply be more ram and a new gpu. but the current gpu and ram in current systems still havent been maxed.
Let's face it, pc gaming took a punch to the stomach this gen and hasn't recovered. There isn't a slew of amazing pc games to make consoles look bad. PC gaming has better hardware but doesn't get the same amount of exclusives.
I don't want my money going to the prop up companies that approve of DRM laden software and sue people for modding the hardware they sell. [...] [Nintendo is] the least bad of the three
Microsoft has XNA Creators Club and Xbox Live Indie Games, allegedly the inspiration for Apple's business model of iPhone Developer Drogram and App Store. Nintendo, on the other hand, has you must have an office and industry experience. So where should one get the industry experience and the money for an office? On PC?
There are some seriously overlooked issues here.
#1 - new consoles are sold at a loss at launch, and are "buoyed" by licensing of games.
#2 - the hottest gaming platform on the planet sells most of its games for Free, $0.99, or $2.99.
#3 - the first company to blink (see: 360) will be trumped for the 5 years afterwards in specs (see: PS3)
#4 - mobile platforms have games that are much more popular per title. Angry Birds, anyone?
#5 - mobile platforms are mobile, and have much *less* hardware
These ideas combine to be a big problem. All platforms have introduced alternative controls. Xbox will never get Blu-Ray, Sony will never get a paid network as big as Live. Nintendo has success without expensive hardware. This means that no one has a big incentive to jump out and say "we can do 1080p more than before". I have a hard time believing the $60/disc model is going to continue, especially when EA aren't giving full content to resold games. Why pay $60 for most of that shit? There are about 5 games a year I'd even consider paying that much for, and I sure don't have the time and capacity to go through a large campaign plus master multiplayer pr0n. I want a game I am satisfied playing in 60 minutes. And you only pay $1/minute if you're getting a Happy Ending.
Part of the PS3's problems stem from the fact that the Cell wasn't supposed to be just the CPU, it was supposed to be the GPU. Sony had demonstrations to this effect. However that was all wishful thinking, when the real Cell hardware was delivered it couldn't stand up to dedicated GPUs. So Sony remade it in to the CPU only, for which it was not well suited. They then had a problem in that they didn't have a GPU. nVidia was, of course, happy to oblige but the thing was they didn't have time for a full redesign. Normally console GPUs are specially designed for consoles. A big thing is sharing system RAM, since consoles have less RAM than PCs and are single user single process and so and handle that better. Most consoles allow for direct GPU use of system RAM or total integration. Also they often feature things like embedded DRAM (the Wii and 360 do and the PS2 did). Well the problem was there wasn't the time for that kind of redesign. Chip design takes a long time. So nVidia was only able to modify a 7800/7900 series architecture a bit. Not a bad card, but not what you wanted for a console.
The net effect with this late design chance is that the Cell has power that isn't used, and may not be able to be used. The actual PPC CPU part gets startved for time and bandwidth and can't dispatch to the Cells effectively. There may not be a way around it, IBM canceled further Cell production because it just doesn't stack up well. Regular CPUs do better at general tasks, GPUs do better at vector/stream tasks.
The PS3 was not a well planned design, it was what they could hack together in the time they had.
^ this
A good follow-up question would be: what astounding new capabilities would it take to motivate a next-gen console?
The next console could have cinema quality real-time 3D and we'd probably still go meh. Mind-reading controllers may turn heads.
You start to get some gameplay changing things like physics. While in some games only simple phsyics may actually be needed and any other stuff just eye candy, that isn't always the case. You get situations where to dumb down the physics is to change the game. Can it be done? Sure but the game may not be as fun, and may not be the same at all. As you said, memory is an issue too. What you can do depends on memory. If you have little RAM you have to keep what happens in your world to a minimum because you can't track it all.
So it isn't just a looks thing, though that matters too. Even if you are one of the "Looks doesn't matter gameplay forever!" people it is still an issue.
I'm not saying that makes the Wii bad, something to be said for low cost, but it IS a real issue for game ports. You want to design a higher end game for all sorts of reasons, the Wii may not handle it.
(posting AC because etc)
Developers are starting to ditch the wii and DS in favor of the 3DS and PSP2. Plus, Microsoft and Sony are betting the futures of the 360 and PS3 on accessories (we all know how well those do, there's a reason why the wiimotes come standard with the wii, nintendo learned the hard way with every accessory from the Zapper to the Balance board).
I expect announcements of new systems in 6 months.
Doesn't matter anymore. We've gotten to a point where games from five years ago still look great. Yeah, it's still improving, but Half-Life 2 still has every bit as much "wow factor" now as it did in 2004.
As fidelity (or, system complexity) increases in everything it makes harder each time to crank out new stuff.
it may not be to microsoft, sony or nintendo's benefit to make a new system, but what is to stop Electronic Arts, Matsushita, Philips, NEC or someone else among these who has attempted before, from trying again? or they can do like Sony did and bravely enter into the video game console business for the first time. since the big 3 don't seem to be working on any hardware, now would be a good time to jump in since all 3 are too scared to do it since they want to squeeze more out of the current hardware than they ever wanted to before.
And a really neat one at that - I can't wait to see what indy developers can do with it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I think you're right, but I'm really really enjoying playing console ports at 1920 x 1200, maximum settings and AA @ 60fps (see GTA4, Burnout Paradise, Mass Effect, Dirt 2 etc etc). It almost makes my $400 graphics card worth the money.
Just look at online gmae serivces like OnLive. Why should I buy a hot noisy local game cpnsole when I can buy a small quiet streaming device and have a game served to me instead. The the game servers just need to be upgraded, and everyone wins. As networks get faster and ltency drips, scren res can be pushed up, and I can play anywhere, even on a handheld if I want.
Consoles are dead, long live the games!
Wouldn't now be the best time for a new console maker to enter the fray?
Sony and MS might be on aging hardware, but they are both in an established, safe position I'm sure they'd like to keep as long as possible. Nintendo has their Wii safety, so it could make sense for them to enter the market with a "core" console, while keeping the Wii around for it's present audience.
However, the ability for a completely new competitor to design a console from essentially "off-the-shelf" components that could out perform the established consoles could open up a new market for someone.
Come to Australia so we can strip search you and rob you of your internets, pr0n, rights and freedoms.
The Xbox 129600's next.
Am I the only one who thinks current generation of consoles are just fine and it's the game developers who's getting behind?
Might be the fact I think console games and PC games are 2 different things.
Console games are casual games. Something that can be rightfully played with a controller.
God of War type of games, Little Big Planet, Assassins Creed, Uncharted, racing games, sports games.. and so on, you get the idea.
The graphics isn't on par with PC, no. But it doesn't need to be. Why is everyone so concerned with graphics?
Assassins Creed looks awesome on console. So does God of War. Good enough for me anyway.
Stop making shitty ports and make console game independent from PC games.
As I've previously said in another thread about console vs PC gaming, what works on a console with a controller, doesn't necessarily work on PC with keyboard and mouse.
Basically my point it, stop worrying so damn much about graphics and focus more on the right gameplay for the right hardware.
There's PC (keyboard & mouse) type games and there is controller type games.
There is no need for next gen consoles.
Current gen introduced HD and recently 3D and motion sensor controllers (granted, Wii have had the latter for a long time, but still).
What would a "next gen" have?
Sure, upgraded hardware, but it would need something else too.
Of course, if some brainiac invents some sort of virtual reality 3D gaming over night, hell, I'll scream for a next gen console with THAT in it.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Every time a new blockbuster comes out, I ask myself "Is this movie better than The Godfather?" And the answer is also, inevitably "no".
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Just because you come up with easily summarized phrases like 5-year cycle to make yourselves feel smart, doesn't mean they EVER had any causal relationship
Maybe there's room for a more open, PC-like solution to consoles that will also help displace MS from gaming-on-the-PC? Given the current level of graphics-card development, would a micro-PC be able handle a card capable of matching or exceeding current gen consoles?
Imagine if a Linux group worked with whichever graphics card maker has the best record with Linux (AMD/ATI?) to create a hardware standard, and accompanying game-optimised branded Linux distro, for a micro-case PC-based "console". (As Google did with Android for phones.) Any manufacturer could make them, and game makers only need to make their games compatible with Game-Linux to play on any branded box (Plus on any PC running a suitable distro.)
You get three benefits: 1) An upgradeable console that keeps up with PC development. 2) Multiple console vendors with compatible games. 3) Games written primarily for Linux.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Seems that this is pure speculation. They are counting their chickens before they hatch. The Wii was launched in 2006. The average is 5, but sometimes 6 years. That means that it could be as long as 2012 until a new Wii is launched. I'm guessing a new Wii will be launched in 2012.
And it being harder to push newer hardware to its limits. This trend will ultimately lead us to a uniform api across consoles, pcs, and operating systems, not only for games, but for all software. In the not too distant future, Sony, Nintendo, MS, Apple, and Linux will compete on affordability, performance, and extensibility because all software available for one will be available for all of them. It simply does not make economic sense for developers to rewrite software to run on different platforms, and economic sense will prevail.
The early consoles were weak... very simple designs, way behind what you found in state of the art PCs, driven by fairly small companies, often using off-the-shelf parts. The latest round used custom GPU and CPU designs, exotic memory, and pushed chip designs to their limits. In short, console development has been exponentially more complex. The five-year cycle was market-driven as much as anything... it certainly didn't take five engineering years to go from FamCom to SNES.
The console market is also an interesting one, in that, it takes so long for a company to sell the console at anything close to a profit, the market's really organized around games as the profit center. So the only advantage to making a new console is to ensure that consumers buy my games, not my competitor's. As long as they're not busting the status quo with a new console announcement, why should I. That doesn't mean there isn't one in development, only that the actual launch is going to cost me lots of money, and it might risk my position relative to the others. I'd rather hold back, as long as my console is doing well.
-Dave Haynie
Maybe not in the incumbents' interest to upgrade, but GPUs and multi-core CPUs have definitely advanced, creating a situation ripe for disruption.
And meanwhile a new gaming platform has actually already gained great traction and momentum: iPhone, app store, and arguably the iPad. Disruptions usually start small...
Well, I play on my desktop, and they play on their laptops.
Two years ago, an article in PC World likened putting a video card in a laptop to open heart surgery. Has this improved over the past two years? And how do kids convince mom to buy them gaming laptops instead of Nintendo DS?
We play w/ 4 people, one person to a PC
I've been to one LAN party in my lifetime. How do players 2-4 convince the other people in their respective households to let them dismantle the family PC and bring it to someone else's house for the night? And when kids say they want their own gaming PC for Christmas, my experience is that mommy says "we already have a computer; take turns".
which is infinitely better than trying to chop up the HDTV screen real estate to share among 4 players.
True, first-person shooters and auto racing games require a split screen. But in what way would, say, a 2D or 2.5D shmup or a fighting game need to chop up the screen?
Shut up and get back to fixing Tweaker's spaghetti code.
Assuming TFA's argument is correct (which I wouldn't necessarily), isn't that the same problem that crippled Microsoft when they just rode the Windows XP gravy train because "hey, people are still buying it"?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!