Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Game Consoles Still Years Off
jfruhlinger writes "Gamers who have grown bored with the current generation of game hardware will have to sit tight a bit longer. Word on the street has it that the next PlayStation won't be ready until 2014, and the next Xbox won't appear until Christmas 2013 at the earliest."
unless I can install an alternate OS and have hardware level access.
>bored with the current generation of game hardware
If the gamers are bored with the game hardware, they may find it immensely more interesting to start playing games on it.
At least now that people are talking about the next console generation, people will finally stop calling the 360, PS3, and Wii "next-gen consoles" despite being the current generation since 2005-06.
We're miles ahead in every category.
We started work on the 360 in the 2002 time frame i think. That'll put it at almost 10 years between generations. This was with 90nm processes.
In 2013/2014 time-frame, 15nm processes should be coming online. That'll already lets you put 27x more stuff on chip at the same die size, in addition to clock speed increases.
I'm hoping they ramp up system memory to 16GB and video memory to 2GB. Maybe 4K resolution gaming. They better get rid of any physical media, and make it download only.
This next generation is going to last for 15 years.
More polygons means more work for artists which means higher budgets and more risk. What's the incentive for a new console when current gen consoles can do anything one could actually want to do?
The question is, what sort of game are people going to want to play that will require new hardware? If you're just throwing a new coat of paint on the same old game designs, what's the point?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Computer hardware is ever changing. Game on your computer, not some shitty console.
I know they claimed at launch (PS3, XBOX) that this would be a ten year generation cycle but damn it feels a lot longer than it sounds. I'm happy to not shell out several hundred dollars per console every five or so years but I also don't want to buy the same gen console as my next console when this one dies.
Life==Jeopardy. All the answers are right in front us - the hard part is coming up with the correct question.
I am not a huge gamer and don't own the new ones(360 or PS3) so I might be off by a bit...or a lot.
I'll use Nintendo since I did grow up with them. The 16bit SNES saw a big jump from the original 8bit NES. The SNES advancements were multiple layers(background moving slower than the foreground). The N64 showed true advancements in 3D rather than just sprites, but what is the difference from the N64, to GameCube, to Wii? The only thing I noticed is that the polygon count became slightly increased and since hardware was becoming better to make the games run smoother.
The only thing I could see them doing is waiting for big advancements in hardware so they can then increase the polygons once again to have more detail at smother movement(more FPS).
Anyone else agree or am I completely off?
"That's right...I said it."
They're already past the 5-year traditional console lifespan (a tradition that's been sacrosanct since the Atari days). And with Playstation gaining ground every day, they're looking real long-in-the-tooth of late. PS3 has MMO's now, user-created content, games that don't have to span several discs (because of the blu-ray drive), blu-ray movie playing capability, etc. The 360 was in the lead for a long time (in the U.S. at least) and MS could have easily secured that lead if they had followed the 5-year lifecyle and bitch-slapped Sony with a next-gen console in Christmas 2010. Instead we got the Kinect, their Wii knockoff that came years after the Wii novelty had worn off (my Wii is sitting in my closet if anyone wants to buy it).
It's a real shame too. Call me a nationalist if you like, but MS was the first American company to compete in the console industry since Atari. And it was nice to not have to wait until a title had been released in Japan for several months to finally get it in the U.S. Sony and Nintendo always treated the west like they were doing us a favor by lowering themselves to even release a game outside of Japan. MS was the first company in a long time to treat the U.S. and Europe as a first-class market instead of an afterthought. And they actually gave us Western-centric games instead of just poorly-translated JRPG's to boot.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Wii-U is due out next year.
I know there'll be people saying it's not a next-gen console because it's graphics aren't much if any better than a PS3, but I would say it is, because it is one that has been designed after seeing the results of the current gen. Like the Wii, Nintendo decided the key to advancement was not pushing graphics, but other aspects of the user experience.
...when you can add a stick / camera for more money?
Personally, if I want to play tennis or go bowling, I go out and play tennis or go bowling
The next generation of consoles are the PS3 with Move and the XBOX360 with Kinect. Both the 360 and the PS3 still aren't being completely utilized to their full processing potential, the move/kinect just opened up a whole bunch of new gameplay options, and NOBODY wants to drop $400 on a brand new console when their current one isn't being utilized enough. The market isn't ready at all for a new generation of consoles, and Microsoft & Sony realize this. They've been planning for it.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
While this does have an effect on the progress in using higher tech on PC, adoption rates for 360/PS3 are just now starting to truly ramp up. It will be interesting to see how much awesome new tech makes it to the next gen given this prospect.
I hear they make videogames, and they have this crazy new console with a 2012. Called a "Wii U" or something. You know, I think they even had another console on the market before this.
I know, I know, the Wii U has less space than a Nomad, so you'd be forgiven for writing it off as "lame," but maybe these spunky upstarts at Nintendo will be worth paying attention to some day. I'm sure they'll never compete with Microsoft or Sony, but hey, you never know.
We're miles ahead in every category.
Except in number of players per machine. Very few PC games support split- or otherwise shared-screen co-op using one TV and two to four USB gamepads. One reason is that apart from a few geeks, almost nobody is willing to hook a PC up to a TV or a TV-sized monitor. But perhaps Cracked columnist David Wong is on to the real reason, calling the requirement of a separate PC and copy of the game per player a cheap revenue-enhancing scheme for game publishers in his article.
That's why I do almost all of my gaming on a PC.
--Member of the Master PC Gaming Race, and proud of it!
They better get rid of any physical media, and make it download only.
Good luck downloading even a single-layer BD-ROM's worth of data over a 5 GB per month satellite link; it'll take you five months. As long as there are still areas unserved by fast broadband without obnoxiously low caps, consoles will still need to use physical media. Even the PSVita will use cartridges.
Rage actually looks better on 360 than PS3, purely because the PS3 just doesn't have enough RAM to hold the art assets to render a single scene at a time
Xbox 360 has 512 MB of RAM and integrated graphics. PS3 has 256 MB of RAM and 256 MB of dedicated VRAM. Why again doesn't the PS3 have enough RAM?
Games usually try to target console first, and then just port to PC
Why is this the case, as opposed to aiming higher with PC exclusives?
and they're not about to redo the entire game's graphic design for a port.
They already do for ports to Wii and ports to DS.
YOU CONSOLE SCUM :)
I'm so backlogged on all of the awesome games out and due to come out for the Playstation 3 that I would be fine into 2020 without a new system.
PC gaming already seem to be slowed by weak consoles. Most games are (bad) ports from console games, and thus restrain the quality that might have been achieved had the game been developed for PC.
However, if the current generation of consoles is kept for another few years, there will be a moment where the difference between PC and consoles will be too great.
I hope it'll be the occasion for PC gaming to drop the console port heavyweight.
The next generation of game consoles is in your hand. It's running either iOS 5, Ice Cream Sandwich or Mango, depending on why your interest lies (sorry, Android is the closest you're going to get to Linux).
The phones are selling such high volumes and adding capabilities so fast that any new hardware console, ostensibly designed for games only, will have a problem getting to critical mass. Not only are we in a post-PC world, we're in a post-game-console world as well.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Hardware doesn't matter when all the games are SHIT.
Fix the industry first, then think about the hardware or else we will have 500 $ consoles that are used to play 10$ indie games.
With the cell processor design of the PS3, increasing performance should be easy and it should be able to retain backward compatibility w/o much if any trouble. With as inexpensive as ram is now , hopefully there will be no reason to skimp there.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The PS3 reserves RAM for it's OS stuff.
And the Xbox 360 doesn't? What's that dashboard I see when I press the home button during a game?
John Carmack has tweeted about this in the past.
It appears I can't search Twitter without having a Twitter account. Would you share some links?
I think Microsoft is deliberately avoiding rushing "something" out there for the next gen console because they are coordinating across ecosystems. For example, on a visible level, I think the next generation Xbox will have a lot of overlap with Xbox Live on Windows Phone and Windows ARM tablet platforms. And behind the scenes, they want to align their development technologies and frameworks to share as much as possible across phone, tablet, desktop, and gaming console.
Since they are only just wrapping up Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, it makes a lot of sense to coordinate "Xbox Next" with that work. If they execute well, this delay could help them in the long run.
Let's face it - games have hardly scratched the surface of the PS3... The Wii games have focused on motion control and forgotten that there are other cool things going on there (Such as a speaker in the controller itself that only a few games have remembered) and the XBox has some really cool Kinect capabilities that are going mostly untouched. Perhaps it's more important to ask why the games are boring when the capabilities aren't being utilized yet?
Smart phones screens are to small and touch screens only work for some kinds of games and for others they suck big time.
Or you could, you know, buy a gaming PC.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20080659-17/next-xbox-to-feature-avatar-like-graphics/
AirPlay / screen mirroring.
Even today the manufacturers of the consoles make losses on the hardware. There is simply
no incentive to have a fast hardware cycle time. The longer you can make games (where the profit
is raked in) on the same platform (console) the better.
how am i supposed to play better games? :O
There are two huge factors working against the release of any further game consoles.
First, graphics have probably hit the law of diminishing returns. Designing yet another generation of hardware and software to improve graphics will be far more expensive than before, but will be noticeable to a shrinking percentage of customers. Also, if next-gen hardware lacks physical media, downloading 20-to-50 GB games will be a nuisance, especially for rental periods.
Second, game consoles are too narrowly focused. Smartphones have reduced dedicated gaming handhelds to a niche. The same thing might happen in the console space with a smartphone-style set-top-box whose main attraction is the ability to download thousands of apps of all sorts and is just OK at playing games. Apple is rumored to be building a TV that will run iOS. If it runs most iOS apps, the vast majority of customers won't care that it's 1/3 as fast as an Xbox 360 and lacks the buttons to play big games.
I love game consoles more than anybody, but the writing is on the wall.
They'll be shown off in 7 months at next year's E3.
The next X-Box will have a launch date before the end of the year, and it will be bungled.
The next Playstation will have a launch date by the end of the year in Japan, and early 2013 in the US, but both dates will be pushed back a bit.
The Wii U has already been shown, and it too will target a release before the end of 2012, but Nintendo never makes their dates for home consoles.
phones don't have the battery life to play high end games for a long time and if you need to be on AC why not just use a PC / Console then?
For those saying that there is no need for a new generation of hardware, realize that most AAA console titles can't even hit 720p at 30FPS on the 360 (See Halo), let alone 1080p30 or better yet, 1080p60. With the same assets and amount of effort on the developer's part, a new hardware generation would easily allow for 1080p60 as the default, with anti-aliasing. That's aside from much more robust programmable shaders, faster Blu-ray drives, hopefully 16-32GB of solid state storage for texture/asset caching, and in the case of MS, integrated 802.11N and finally eliminating their "core" version from the marketplace so that developers will be able to rely on all users having secondary storage, expanding the market for DLC and on-line features significantly. 6 years ago very few consumers could afford HD screens, certainly not above 42",and 1080p wasn't yet ubiquitous. Today we can buy 50+ inch 1080p 120hz LCDs or Plasmas for well under $2k USD. I think it's definitely time for a new cycle.
Current consoles are good enough for pushing pixels on to 2d planes with a limited rectangular window. What we really need is a real innovation in display technology, and I'm not talking this stereoscopic, trick of the eyes gimmick. I'm talking the 3d holographic displays you see in science fiction. The ability to project any object anywhere into mid air. Make this possible and then you'll see a real need for better processing power.
An "Open" game platform and standards would kick PS3...XBox to the curb of ancient technology history, and finally allow global "Open" game platform innovation.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I don't buy it as there were Xbox 720 ads ringside during the movie "Real Steal" :)
With such a slow turnaround, consoles will probably not be able to compete with the fast development of tablets/phones. Especially with the hardware armaments race between android and ipad on a 6 ish month upgrade schedule being fueled by everything from games to utilities to multimedia to whatever other use can be found for them. They'll catch up to the xbox/ps3 in power before the next console generation comes out. Assuming the consoles really do make it to market. And even if they do come out, unless they match the development cycle of tablets, they'll be obsolete in a year.
The next console is going to be the tablet you plug into your tv through it's mini hdmi and use either with bluetooth controllers/accessories or using the tablet itself as a controller (synched with other tablets for multiplayer) . Playing games you downloaded from whatever equivalent of steam or appstore you happen to favor at the time.
... and the RROD debacle surely skewed the 360s numbers a bit.
Ohhhh, yeah, it did. I didn't buy a 360 until they shipped the generation with Jasper chipsets.
And I know many people who still haven't purchased a 360 or have refused to support Microsoft since their original 360 burned out years ago.
If I'm going to play for 4 or more hours on single player or with other gamers I'll hop on my PC and play a bit of CIV or Battlefield, if I'm going to play with non-gamer friends, I'll get the Wii out
So what do you get out if you want to play an indie game with non-gamer friends? Or does that situation happen never to arise?
My real complaint is that small companies with a working PC game supporting local multiplayer can't sell it, "because the market is virtually non-existent" as you point out, nor can they get a license to port it to a console, because they're too small. It appears development of video games supporting local multiplayer is for large, established companies only. Why should this continue to be the case?
PC gaming is the Porsche level experience of gaming. The consoles are Chevy Malibus and Ford Fusions.
To continue your analogy, Chevy Malibus and Ford Fusions can travel only to big-box hypermarkets, not to local grocery stores, and definitely not to a local farmer's market, according to restrictions published by the automaker. What's the entry-level configuration that still allows playing indie games?
This is a very good point. If Apple were to somehow convince the telecom companies to bundle an Apple TV box with iPhones, we'd see the start of something big.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Xbox 720? It's bad enough that Microsoft skipped 359 numbers to "360". The next Xbox will be the 361. Bank on it!
Even today the manufacturers of the consoles make losses on the hardware. There is simply
no incentive to have a fast hardware cycle time. The longer you can make games (where the profit
is raked in) on the same platform (console) the better.
Wrong.
Nintendo didn't sell at a loss.
Be seeing you...
My solution is simple . . . Microsoft listen and learn! Rather than waste the time and money to design and sell something that you loose money on and is outdated the moment it hits the shelves. Why not build the "Virtual Console", this would be everything the real console is without the expensive obsolete hardware. It would boot on your existing bare metal box PC for maximum performance or install in to Windows 7 / 8 as an add-on application.
Microsoft, if you are smart enough to take this idea, just pay me 25% of the profit and I will call us even.
Thank you, Mike Riley of Texas
I'd just like to point out that the "5 year cycle" is a myth. please think for yourself.
The average Joe is satisfied with the current consoles, and therefore Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo doesn't see why they should invest in new technology.
PC gamers, which are not average Joes, are not to buy a console anyway.
Because a PC (clue is in the title) is designed to have only one person interacting with it
So you're stressing the "personal" in "personal computer". So let's build a family computer. Oh wait, Nintendo already stole that name in Asia for a game console.
There's no reason you couldn't have more local multiplayer on PCs but virtually no-one is interested in that.
Then on which platform are people interested in playing multiplayer games in the lounge, around the TV, from indie developers?
Typically one
Can you play all games on a console with 4 players? No.
Can you play some games on a PC with 4 players? Yes.
Is it much harder to find games that can be played with 4 players on a PC than on a console? Yes.
Is it much harder to sell games that can be played with 4 players on a PC than on a console? Yes.
This is the sentiment that I was trying to capture with "Typically one." I understand that there exist exceptions to absolute statements, but compared to the consoles, local multiplayer on PC remains a rounding error.
...is *just now* starting to get exciting releases like Portal 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, LA Noire, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Uncharted 3 (and 1 and 2 but those are older), Assassin's Creed series, etc. Many of these are older than "just now" of course, but the point stands that most people are only recently experiencing them, having been wary to jump on a 600 dollar console like the PS3 and the Wii not really coming into its own until last year (2010).
Or what, did you want your PC version of CoD to offer split-screen support?
Yes. I want two-player split screen, just like the Xbox 360 version has. I also want more fighting games, which don't even need to split the screen, to get ported to PC. Right now it's Street Fighter IV and not much else.
You can see it best when you run a console game on a PC, the only taxing thing is when you turn all the options on (in your graphics driver) and raise the resolution because on the same resolution and same options as a console, your PC will fall asleep.
It ain't just GPU or even memory. It is even such a simple thing as HD speed. What game developer would code for the slowest laptop HD out there? A console developer.
Put all the limitations together and you can see why some of the biggest money earners in gaming history have not made their way on to the console. The Sims and WoW. None of the games are visually immidiately impressive but they simply take a LOT of memory and a LOT of random disk access.
Why? Because they are non-linear games. The next time you wonder at the marvel of the graphical complexity of a BF3 or even a Rage, ask yourself this... how much am I seeing at a time? Randomly? The games are on rails, with very old style dark corridors between areas to allow the swapping of areas. They remind me a LOT of theme park rides. Where you have large rooms seperated for sound and sight with dark corners.
The real way to tax a PC is to load up the Sims or Operation Flashpoint and to load up the scene with different models. The makers of F.E.A.R. talked about this, they could choose either to have a room impress with lights or with monsters but not both. Next time you see a "big" area on a console, ask yourself, what is missing. What did they have to cut in Y to make X happen.
With a PC, you can simply do both. That is why custom maps, mods and whatever are often so much more impressive to what the original game developers can do. Because anyone that uses mods KNOWS their PC must exceed the recommended spec, not just meet minimum. But on the console, it is all the same absolute minimum approach.
Remember all those people that thought a PS3 would make a good linux machine? They probably never tried it. When was the last time you where happy with a PC with 256mb memory, the smallest and slowest laptop HD they could find and a power consumption that would make Nvidia blush?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
16GB system memory PLUS 2GB video memory. That is a decent spec for a modern game PC. Consoles NEVER in their entire history have been up to spec to even a budget game PC. Considering the history I think you will be lucky with 2GB total memory.
And as for no-physical media. That would rob them of endless miles of advertising space in the shops. It would ALSO require them to add a HD that is NOT sold as dump ware because absolutely nobody else is willing to buy them anymore. Have you noticed that console HD space has been running just behind Netbook HD space? The netbooks go up a notch, the consoles take the old notch? Netbooks go 600, consoles take 320. (Budget PC's for earlier in history)
That is because while HD's are dirt cheap by PC buyers standards, they are a massive chunk out of the budget of a console.
As for 4k resolution... yes, same as consoles are now HD right? Well, I played Red Dead Redemption. Nice game but no way in HELL that was true HD. I played lego games with smaller pixels. It was called Duplo!
Your post reminds me a bit of the mockups people do for new handheld consoles. There are some to drool over DS renderings out there... then what do we get? A piece of plastic with an eye watering 3D display... I want my fans vision! Not reality!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It is now easy to buy a PC with comparable hardware as the consoles for extremely low prices (near bottom of the line models). I recall an interview with John Carmack about Rage where he was discussing using Intel's integrated graphics. So to any console gamers out there that want better hardware, I would simply suggest buying a new computer and playing your games there.
As a side note: this is not meant to be a commentary on which is more fun to play on (console or PC), but simply a commentary on which you have more control over.
I have my next gen console in my pocket and on my coffee table. My iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are my next gen game consoles. If I want to use my TV I can link it up to Apple TV and take advantage of gyros and accelerometers and touch inputs for my controller.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Parents everywhere rejoice...