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Microsoft Says Upcoming Project Scorpio Might Be the Last Console Generation (engadget.com)
Earlier this year, Xbox chief Phil Spencer expressed desires to see a steady stream of hardware innovation rather than a typical seven-year gap between different console generations, noting smartphone market as inspiration. In an interview with Engadget, Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft's Head of Xbox Games Marketing has hinted that the company's upcoming Project Scorpio is likely going to be the last generation of Xbox console you will ever need to purchase. From the report: I think it is ... For us, we think the future is without console generations, we think that the ability to build a library, a community, to be able to iterate with the hardware, we're making a pretty big bet on that with Project Scorpio. We're basically saying 'this isn't a new generation, everything you have continues forward and it works.' We think of this as a family of devices. But we'll see, we're going to learn from this, we're going to see how that goes. So far I'd say based on the reaction there appears to be a lot of demand and interest around Project Scorpio, and we think it's going to be a pretty big success. If the games and the content deliver, which I think they will do, I think it will change the way we think about the future of console gaming."
The new Appbox Scorpio only apps APPS, NOT LUDDITE games like the LUDDITE Xbox One, and modern app appers ONLY app apps! Apps!
No one needs more than Project Scorpio.
The scorpion in this apt project name is certainly Microsoft, while the frog represents the gamers, the industry and our control.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
to be able to iterate with the hardware
The whole POINT of a console over a PC is a known quantity for software makers. You don't have to guess at CPU or GPU or RAM or what-have-you, you know the EXACT hardware specs of 100% of your target audience.
Take that away and what exactly would differentiate Scorpio from a gaming PC? I remember on the N64 when they started making extra RAM for it and you had to check the boxes for whether it required that particular hardware expansion or not. They stopped doing that on future consoles because it was STUPID.
What is it with Microsoft lately? Windows 10 being the 'last' Windows, everything after coming as patches and service packs, now their console division doing the same? Do they think we have somehow reached the end of the line of creating anything new ever that just won't work with old shit anymore?
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Seems... sensible.
...they can have my money for another console if and when they abandon this incredibly toxic and annoying "cloud"-based approach to gaming. I am NOT going to spend money on a console that inherits the unacceptable shortcomings of the XB One. Put the games on disk, sell the disc, let me stick the disc in the machine. it should work. It should NOT go into a paroxysm of download after download at the game and system and add-on level. I have literally watched a NEW game take HOURS to become usable on the XB One. Wrong direction, Microsoft (and Sony, and whoever.) I pay, I stick it in the console, and it works. Otherwise, no thanks. My time is worth more than your bleeding cloud-mania.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Completely different hardware, with different specs and capacity components, requiring developers to test the many different configurations.
Where have we seen this before... Hrmm, I think they call them PCs.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
The more they squeeze, the less likely I will be able to give blood. Hell, just rent everyone the hardware....monetize baby.
No one tell Gordon Moore what he just said.
I've suspected this for a while now. I think in the future we'll see Xbox and Playstation branded PCs with Live and PSN as Steam alternatives.
The reason I dare say most people buy a console for games is they know any game they buy for that console will just-simply-work (unless it's from EA). If you don't mind the upgrade / incompatibility issues, you're probably already bought a PC and play your games there. Why do we need to turn console gaming into yet another version of PC gaming exactly? (other than the obvious - because we want more money)
If nothing else, they're already late to the game in the arena of merging PC and console gaming: Steam BigPicture anyone?
Wasn't it yesterday the phone market came out saying they're realizing the phone market is being over saturated with new models every year and they need to scale it back? Though I suppose the percentage of gamers wanting new hardware frequently is higher than the percentage of phone users wanting new hardware frequently.
...so we're back to the 'impending death of the gaming console' again?
Seems like we just heard about the "death of the gaming computer" but I guess the cycles move more quickly.
How's that "death of the laptop" coming along by the way? I seem to recall the "experts" prognosticating we'd all be working on touchscreen tablets by now? Then of course there's paper - totally dead-tech too, amirite?
Well, I have to run and answer some of my 140+ work emails. It's a lot for something else I've been told is totally obsolescent and "dead".
-Styopa
640K ought to be enough for anyone.
Earlier this year, Xbox chief Phil Spencer expressed desires to see a steady stream of hardware innovation rather than a typical seven-year gap between different console generations, noting smartphone market as inspiration
Isn't that an ecosystem consumers actually don't like?
This is the first move in response to what Apple is doing with the AppleTV. AppleTV currently has a small foothold in gaming... but it's growing.
Apple has shown, with iPhones/iPads, that it can put out a revision of their hardware every year and keep backwards compatibility with a huge App library. After a few years/revisions the AppleTV will be just as powerful as current-gen consoles and (just as we saw with mobile gaming overtaking mobile consoles) AppleTV will begin to suck dollars out of the established consoles.
Apple can (if they want to) iterate faster and provide a better ecosystem than Microsoft or Sony... and Microsoft knows it. Microsoft wants to get ahead of the game by switching up their model to allow for faster hardware iteration.
Will be interesting to see where this all goes...
$1,50 for all that wisdom? you surely are on a crisis. and next time you show your ass, may your retarded sibling shall not be the only murderer any longer.
I mean, the big reason consoles are still popular is their nature as essentially "set top boxes" to attach to your television(s) at home.
There's really no reason you couldn't make every single game title ever played on a console run just as well on a properly configured computer. But even if *everything* was ported over, it wouldn't change the situation.
People like consoles for the ease of use and their nature as single-purpose devices. (Well, multi-purpose if you count gaming as one task, and playback of media as another.) They're designed to just plug in the wall for power, attach a single cable to the TV for audio/video, and go.
Once you start blurring the lines, selling "upgradable consoles" or "PC/console combo" devices? I think you're losing sight of what they're all about to begin with.
Wasn't this already somewhat true? For example, there are different revisions of the PS2 and a few games that won't run on one model or another. I think Microsoft wants more rapid changes to consoles because it will encourage to buy newer consoles that support new games. Likewise, Microsoft wants to sell apps and games through their store because they can take a cut of those sales, both on PCs and consoles. I think it's all about trying to increase more revenue and perhaps get a steadier stream of money rather than big sales every few years when a new console is released.
So, Steam? SteamOS must have the right idea, a platform that delivers content regardless of the physical platform.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Taking a hint from the smartphone market means that instead of releasing a "good" console every 3 to 6 years or so (one generation), they'll be releasing a (crippled) Xbox "Main" every 12 months, and an "updated" or "slim" or some other crap marketing term, Xbox "S" (short for "Shafting the consumer") in the 6 months following the release of "Main". The "Main" version brings all the new wizzy features that no one wants or needs while the "S" version is just a minor spec bump.
In other words, your console will be obsolete sooner, and you'll be expected to buy a new one every 1-2 years. Like your phone. Microsoft will enforce this by dropping support for older consoles in the new API.
This is what console gamers want, they don't want frequent hardware upgrades. They just want games to work, and their friends to play with. The market will support whatever decision they make due to the markets size, but they will find the market fragments, into updates every 6+ years or updates every 2.
A great way to drive continuous hardware sales. Sell a base set of hardware, then over time make game developers require newer hardware modules to run. So over time the games might say you need a Scorpio with the X6 memory adapter. Then later games will require the X6 memory adapter and the Kit9 Video Blaster. Then after that games will require the X9 memory adapter, the Kit9 video blaster and the K10 sound twirler. Way to get people to endlessly upgrade.
this could be a good and a bad thing. the funny thing though is that the console monkies who scrape shields with the pc master race are going to start running into the same issues as pc - the dreaded "mine is just slightly too slow to run this well" - where right now the games are easy to scale back for the target that is not moving. and they will be spending more money over less time to maintain micro improvements. and at that point, there is really no reason a console should not just be a normal windows pc other than marketing.
nope.
Project Scorpio is likely going to be the last generation of Xbox console you will ever need to purchase.
Wow, wish I would have known that before I bought an XBone.
Does the Microsoft console platform I'll never have to buy another of contain all of the 640k RAM that I'll ever need?
One possible future for this may come through sometime in 2025, when 5G should be widely deployed. It offers (on paper) such sheer bandwidth and low latency through cloud edge small datacenters in every city quarter and millions of small cell base stations, that it's possible you'll have game subscriptions on your smart tv. Think OnLive, but actually working.
Small. Monthly. Fees.
Don't purchase a console, lease one, for a "small monthly fee". Also includes a selection of games, and "free" upgrades every generation.
All your data is stored in "the cloud".
Think XBone "Gold", but including hardware, and upgrades. For another "small monthly fee".
Directx was a good thing for Microsoft, but when they started making game consoles, Windows suffered.
It's been bad for PC gamers too. Many PC games looked no better than their Xbox counterparts because everyone dumbed down the games to run on the Xbox.
I don't think that MS has the will to do two platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
But with less functionality and fewer options. Oh, and more spyware. Brilliant!
Filthy casuals are the reason ms gets away with this garbage and W10. Almost makes me want to switch to linux and boycott ms.
Almost.
I don't think is a good idea for Microsoft, get any inspiration from their expertise and/or experience on the smartphone market. Only if this inspiration is on the form of "Learning from own my mistakes..."
This sounds like the same "strategy" that MS is using for win10, the question remains, how are they going to monetize you, oops, sorry, I mean it.
Microsoft lost the Desktop in my last 3 companies who have moved to Mac and Linux. A Dell on the Desktop is around a grand, and it costs the company much more money to maintain it. Antivirus, Windows AD licenses, Anti-Malware, Human support costs and Downtime, boot protection, Software Management tools, etc.. etc.. etc.. The TCO for a PC on a desktop is at least that of a MAC.
MS trying to change the console won't change companies like Sony who will still sell a fixed Console PS-x which outsells MS.
This is simply more mis-management by MS. Label it a business decision if you want, and justify it fairly instead of fairy tale BS.
And then someone invents true-color pixels, and we need to upgrade again (please)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think I see what MS is trying to do here. My guess is that they want something that looks more like the mobile phone model for consoles. Which is to say, rather than the "hard" generational breaks you get with the traditional console cycle, where every 5-8 years a new console comes along and renders the old one obsolete, they instead want new hardware every 2 years or so (at a guess), which emphasises evolution rather than revolution.
What I also suspect is that they're planning a kind of limited back/forward compatibility system for games. They've repeatedly said that Scorpio will not get exclusives. A lot of people are suspicious of this, but I actually believe what they've said. That said, I still think they're being disingenuous. Their next step will likely be another console iteration maybe 2 years after Scorpio (2019), let's call it Sagittarius, whose titles will be playable on Scorpio hardware, albeit with lower performance, but not on the current XB1. The eventual successor to Sagittarius (2021) will share compatibility with that console, but not with Scorpio - and so on. So Scorpio will technically never have exclusives.
That said, this is still a risky proposition. By and large, console gamers like the fairly long console cycle. They're usually on a tighter budget than PC gamers and being able to get away with very infrequent hardware changes is a plus.
Moreover, what this plan (if it is indeed their plan) would do is eliminate the mid/late part of the traditional console cycle. That's not necessarily a good thing. For gamers, the early part of the cycle is usually a pretty dire time. Early adopters tend to get a mixture of thin technological showcases and sloppy, hurried ports of games originally developed for the previous generation. There are very, very few classic console games that were early-cycle releases, from the mid-90s onwards. In the mid/late cycle, developers are comfortable with the hardware and the focus shifts more onto the actual games.
The mid/late cycle is also traditionally a good time for the console manufacturer. Launch windows are awful. They're risky and they need a lot of upfront investment (in hardware development, games development, support for third parties and marketing) that can be hard to recoup quickly. By contrast, in the mid/late cycle, the real cash cow, which is to say the third-party licensing fees (which are, I cannot emphasise enough, where the real money is in the industry) are flowing in nicely. Admittedly, in the 360/PS3 generation, the late-cycle was allowed to go on too long and gamers lost interest, but that was more down to tactics than industry structure.
So in some respects, this looks a bit of a self-destructive strategy. However, I think the industry has painted itself into a corner in this generation. For the first time I can remember, the real battleground between the main rivals was not their exclusive games franchises, but on multiplatform performance. With modern development costs, platform manufacturers can no longer afford to fund the same number or quality of outright exclusives. Instead, the PR battle was fought on technical specs; Sony annihilated MS when the PS4 and XB1 launched because the PS4 had some nominal performance advantages that were hard to even perceive for most gamers, but which made great marketing.
So the industry has locked itself into a battle of technical one-upsmanship. Worse, it's done so at a time when PC gaming is seriously resurgent. Trying to get into a tech-specs battle with the PC gaming scene is an unwinnable fight. So now, if Sony and MS don't want to lose a fight on the ground they themselves have chosen, they need to keep iterating the hardware to remain competitive.
That company is US Government spy operations. They backstabbed the entire world.
All of their operations and devices are spyware. Fuck them in their asses to death.
Microsoft branded PC, that will be DRM'd to death and locked down. Following in Apple's footsteps...
How original...
Called Project Aria...for the gaming world that is....
Has anyone asked Hank Scorpio what his opinion of this is?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Also being able to be played easilly on a large screen TV is also a plus as it gives me more to do with my 40 inch TV and nicer then a 19 inch monitor
Essentially all recent PCs support HDMI output to your 40-inch TV, be it through an HDMI port or through HDMI signals on a DVI port. Older PCs instead support VGA + analog audio output to your 40-inch TV.
Apple? Never even came up at MSFT. This is all about Steam and Sony. Apple TVs are running ARM, not an APU and could run a modern console game (even if it was ported). However, it has everything to do with getting their corporate butt kicked by Sony in the console space; Sony out spec'd them with the AMD/APU and memory. The other reason (it might even be the main reason) is Steam. They want to force all W10 products, in particular video games, to come through their app store and run on UWP. Or whatever acronym they are using for Universal Windows Platform. The same *platform* that will allow console games to run unmodified on W10. The hilarious news is they will no doubt lock the games to console speeds to enable cross platform play within MSFT products. Now add that to the W10 new installations only allowed signed device drivers and you get one more grab at vendors cash. MSFT W* certified stickers cost tens of thousands. Each driver iteration is a nice little chuck of change for corporate.
...and 640K is all the RAM you'll ever need.
This is about as dumb as when I decided that my 80286 computer would never need more than 20 megabytes of disk space. For as long as Microsoft has been around you would think that they would know better than to say stupid things like this.
They make all of this sound so very innovative. As if they haven't been stealing wholesale from Valve's playbook and twisting it toward their own desire for profit and market control.
We're using the mobile market as inspiration here? Because nobody's every had compatibility issues in the mobile realm! Hell even on Apple, there's continual confusion about what apps will run on what model of the iPhone using what version of iOS.
So we now have:
- Developers get stuck with the PC problem of always having an untestable and ever-moving set of hardware specs rather than a fixed, guaranteed target platform.
- Users are now going to be saddled with a guess-and-hope scenario when purchasing a new game since there's no guarantee the game will work with their particular hardware configuration.
- And even if they get one, they'll probably have the joy of graphics sliders and other vaguely-defined performance tuning mechanisms to spend hours screwing with trying to get their game to look relatively decent without being horrifically slow and choppy.
This sounds like a winning idea to me. At least for Sony and Nintendo.
All new Hw/sw can be upward compatible if the organization puts in the effort....but are we really better off ? Compare and contrast the mainframe and PC marketplace evolution .....
But yes, essentially a PC: http://www.eurogamer.net/artic...
Twinstiq, game news
The whole reason I went with consoles was to avoid compatibility issues and have the guarantee that if I pop in a disc it will work.
Twinstiq, game news
Remember when Xbox One and PS4 were going to be the last generation of consoles?
Then remember how that generation was significantly shorter than all the other generations?
Me too.
Scorpio sounds like the PC-ification of the XBox console world. The price point, the 'last console' hints.
They are selling you a PC with some modular components to switch out easily, that looks good next to your TV. You will upgrade it like a PC.
Perhaps they will offer simplified multi-functional module packs (i.e. CPU + GPU module, separate RAM module) .. but all this amounts to is enabling quality sliders in console games and having some annual update/version. I bet they want cute code names like Android uses. Or they will just use the year .. "2015+ Certified Game" .. the quality slider will just be set automatically based on the components.
The point of all of this is that they are burning through TONS of cash playing the hardware game against Sony. They like the licensing portion. It's cheap to manage and run. Project Scorpio is likely a hardware certification where partners can manufacture devices. It's "many" devices. Slow devices, fast devices, portable devices. They really are all just repackaged PCs. The question is if they can leverage their existing XBox user base to make the leap and how broad their nod toward the smartphone industry is. It sounds to me like they want to be the Google-to-Android of the Scorpio world, with ~$700 in upgrades every two years if you stay with the latest and greatest. Maybe Project Scorpio is just a glorified dock.
How will I get in to 8K gaming when it comes? Will Scorpio give that to me?
He said think three times in the last sentence alone.
Monitors have always had way better resolution than TV, but consoles have only been supporting TV-style resolutions.
That's because monitors have tended to be far smaller (physically) than living room TVs. One of the big draws of a console compared to a PC is a historic culture around offline multiplayer. Screen sharing is sort of hard with the 13" VGA monitors that were common when "monitor" resolutions started to diverge from "TV" resolutions. But now that TVs can act as PC monitors, you're starting to see more indie PC games that take multiple USB game controllers. And because indie games tend to be less graphically complex, they're more likely to work on the integrated graphics of a laptop or NUC.
There are tons of fighting games for PC and we get all of the Street Fighter games as soon as they come out
There are flat fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and there are platform fighting games like Super Smash Bros. or PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, where players can use terrain in a stage for an advantage. Which PC games in the latter category would you recommend for people who aren't "all Final Destination all the time"?
If you build a PC, you get a computer, something that can be upgraded, a TOOOL, and of course a great-gaming-platform, not just a TV-toy
It sounds like you're comparing building a single machine (a gaming PC) to buying two machines (an "office" PC and a game console). You'd end up having to keep carrying your gaming PC back and forth between the TV room and your computer desk. Or does the Steam Link extender adequately solve that?