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Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers

Posted by Soulskill on from the everybody-needs-a-second-job-these-days dept.

MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."

8 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. let me go home and cry some more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)

    yes, I do it daily... TF2 still rocks.

    1. Re:let me go home and cry some more by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, it's easy, because most games these days are designed for consoles that are about as powerful as a five-year-old PC.

    2. Re:let me go home and cry some more by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let's crunch the numbers: It's the thick end of being 2012 now. Not quite; but a 6 year old computer would be a somewhere in 2005 piece of kit.

      Depending on how much you spent at the time, that would mean an LGA775, 90nm, 'Prescott' P4 at between 2.8 and 3.8GHz(stock) or a socket 745 or 939 A64 somewhere between 1.8 and 2.6GHz(stock).

      Either of those would(unless you bought a really crappy motherboard, in which case it probably wasn't a gaming PC anyway) almost certainly have had a 16x PCIe slot, so they would be fully compatible with almost any video card released in the last six years. If you bought in 2005, a GeForce 6800 or RADEON X800/X850 would have been available, if not necessarily inexpensive. Either of those would happily enough play F.E.A.R. or CoD2 at 1280x1024 at 30FPS, and those were considered comparatively intensive games for their time.

      Actually kitting your 2005 system out with 4GB of RAM would probably have been too rich for most buyer's blood; with one or two being more likely; but most motherboards of the era(again, omitting cut-down junk that would never have been gaming, even at the time) should have 4 DDR2 slots, making an upgrade to an adequate-for-most-games 3 or 4GB quite cheap assuming your original configuration was 2x512 or 2x1GB.

      Sounds totally doable to me, even if you aren't a retro-gaming enthusiast...

    3. Re:let me go home and cry some more by jank1887 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      even simpler than that:
      if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today? the few pc games I play anymore would be considered 'abandonware' even though they're all from this millenium. I was trying to hunt down my Monkey Island Madness CD for my 10 year old, as it came up in conversation and she expressed interest. Games don't just stop being fun because they're old, and there's a HUGE library of games out there. My kids DS plays gameboy advance games. I walk into gamestop, he uses his allowance to pick out 2-3 new (to him) games from the used GBA game bin, and he still has money left over. Or, he can get one DS game (maybe) with that same allowance. He figured out the math pretty fast.

  2. Horribly inaccurate conclusion... by Dahamma · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time.

    The fact that a Wii is used for streaming 33 *percent* of the time has nothing to do with the *amount* of time spent streaming. It's not only possible, but very likely that XBox and PS3 users spend a lot more total time using their consoles than Wii users.

  3. Yes, I can by bonch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?

    These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.

    Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.

  4. Re:But the Wii doesn't even do HD! by garcia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I stream with the Wii because I don't have an HDTV nor will we for the foreseeable future. I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the same boat as me who, with one kid and one on the way, one income and very little disposable cash, can't seem to justify a $500 TV purchase when we're using Netflix instead of cable to save money in the first place.

  5. Re:But the Wii doesn't even do HD! by ZombieBraintrust · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Most peoples internet connections don't do HD streaming very well. People who own a Wii are also less likely to own an HD TV than people who own a PS3. So it doesn't matter that it can't do 1080p.