Impact of XBox One X on the industry and competition *spawn

Sure. I could see that. Main reason to stop releases for prior gen is to stop having to do physical releases. Maybe digital releases end up more open-ended?
Yea never thought about that being a hard tie in. Yea. Digital resolves so many of those problems. Coupled with their intelligent delivery system, it knows what your system can handle (incase you own XBO and XB2). Download the necessary files specifically for your system.
 
Another question might as well be "what could you do on PS5 that you couldn't do on X1X". I mean, look at the way X1X optimised games can scale down to the Switch. The frikkin' Switch. There is likely to be a point where scaling downwards disproportionately fucks up a game but there's a fair degree of wiggle room so long as you're careful about minimum CPU capability when you design.

But the Switch is in a very limited scenario : basically, it can only run the games running at 60fps on PS4/XB1.

I'm certain that the X would be able to do that. But for games running at 30fps ?

I don't see how it will resolve this problem if the next-gen comes with a much faster CPU unless developers specially develop their games with the X in mind.

But people aren't especially fans of cross-gen games and want their new hardware to be fully exploited.
 
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But the Switch is in a very limited scenario : basically, it can only run the games running at 60fps on PS4/XB1.

I'm certain that the X would be able to do that. But for games running at 30fps ?

I don't see how it will resolve this problem if the next-gen comes with a much faster CPU unless developers specially develop their games with the X in mind.

But people aren't especially fans of cross-gen games and want their new hardware to be fully exploited.
I think the answer here is: it depends.

It depends on what is taking up huge amounts of CPU load. If it's animation and AI taking up 50% of that CPU power, then yea, X1X is toast.
But if say, the render() thread which, often is a large chunk of CPU (over 50%) just dispatching to the GPU what to draw on the screen.
If so, and certain tech is properly leverage and utilized, it might actually be ok. *might*, but that's as far as I would go in defending that statement.
 
I expect it to be like a longer transition period, letting developers pick and choose which platforms they want to release on as opposed to being forced to deploy on just the current gen.
Developer choice is good party stuff and all but if the platform holder wants to incentivise new hardware they'll be putting pressure on publishers to urge dropping support of old hardware. Big publishers may be able to resists but equally, as time wind on, getting new technology to work on older less powerful hardware becomes harder and harder. It'll be interesting to watch how this pays in once Microsoft new hardware comes on the scene.
 
Developer choice is good party stuff and all but if the platform holder wants to incentivise new hardware they'll be putting pressure on publishers to urge dropping support of old hardware. Big publishers may be able to resists but equally, as time wind on, getting new technology to work on older less powerful hardware becomes harder and harder. It'll be interesting to watch how this pays in once Microsoft new hardware comes on the scene.

I don't really agree with this. IMO, console holders want to hold onto their user base more than they want to incentivize new hardware purchase.

New hardware was traditionally there to prevent the loss of users to a newer competing platform or to get new revenue streams going as a console generation died down due to obsolete hardware. But that basically meant rebooting your revenue stream each time you did that with an ensuing downturn in revenue as revenue slowly ramped up again during the generation.

Additionally hard console generation resets risk losing users to the competition as there is no continuing legacy of investment in the platform.

IMO, that's bad for the console holder and bad for developers and publishers.

Again, I still believe the best way forward is rolling generations. Every console represents the same power increase over the prevous 6-8 year old console. Just like traditional console cycles. Only now each "generation" happens every 3-4 years.

The consoles already remain relatively cutting edge and there's always an entry point into the current generation. That means not only is it good for the console maker, developer and publisher, but the consumer as well.

It just has to be communicated clearly to the consumer that once a new console drops, mandatory game support ends at the previously released console. However, developers are free to support older consoles if they wish.

So every console has mandatory support by games for 6-8 years.

As long as games remain scalable (this is a given if a PC release is even remotely a consideration), then this won't restrict what can be done on a new "generation" console. In other words, it won't be at a disadvantage versus a traditional console that breaks compatibility every 6-8 years.

Ryse, a launch title for the current traditional generation didn't take into account any previous gen hardware when it was made and still looked next gen.

It runs fins on a 2009 era graphics card. That's a high end card, but it's also high quality settings. At low it'll run on far more modest hardware. Hardware that would have been weaker that what a 2009-2010 console might have had.


Scaling games down is much easier than scaling games up. Heck, the 5870 was also a radically different GPU arch. than what was in the XBO. It'd be another 2 GPU generations before GCN got its start.

That's a console exclusive (PC version came out much later). A next generation (at the time) graphics showcase. And it has no problems running on hardware that is 4 years older and weaker than the XBO.

Just to drive that home. Gears of War 4, also runs just fine on 2009 era hardware. That's almost at the cutoff for mandatory support of a 2016 release (3 years after launch running, hardware 7 years older than the game release...1 whole traditional console generation) for a hypothetical rolling generation. Anything launched after the XBO-X would, in this paradigm, not have to have mandatory support for anything older than the XBO. Forza Horizon 3 won't run however, as it only supports DX12, but it likely could run if there was a Dx11 rendering path.

It's strange that people think it's extraordinarily difficult to support older generations of hardware, when that has been done on PC for that past 2 decades. There's no secret sauce involved. Hell, companies porting current gen console games to PC aren't even trying to make it run on 2009 era hardware. Their minimum requirements don't go that far back because they don't test hardware that far back. But as long as it has a Dx11 rendering path (almost all do) then it just automatically works for the most part.

Regards,
SB
 
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I see both points of view. And both are pretty valid. On one hand, the main gaming population wants the latest and greatest.

They want games that are built to take advantage of their investment now.

On the other hand we have groups that are in the middle of a series, say they love uncharted series on PS3, but are forced to upgrade to PS4 to play the last chapter of the series and they are upset by that because that’s all they wanted to play and they see the ads for the final chapter but can’t play it and that is upsetting to them.

I’m not sure what the right answer is. From DSoups perspective if you don’t kick people off the system then developers will keep making content for the lowest common denominator. And that’s not theoretically next gen gaming (though 4K HDR is beeeeast). And we can get into discussions about memory pool sizes and CPU differences and the answer is if the game is compromised on earlier systems it may need to be exclusively locked, or you’ll have to pull a destiny 1 / destiny 2 scenario.

Either way. Enabling exclusives would get people to start buying into the next console.

As per SB
If they do enable exclusives for X1X I’d still expect to see XB2 in 2021 to be able to play those games and move the baseline forward.
 
AFAICS any game that can run on XB1X can run on XB1. Unless you want to set a minimum visual quality, there's no reason to be exclusive. Those who bought an XB1X for 4K probably don't want to play future games in 1080p either, so that's not a great option going forwards. I can't fathom the mindset of a dev who'd target XB1X but not XB1. It'd have to be something so incredible that they could be confident 90+% of XB1X owners would buy it. Except we don't even know how many XB1X's have been sold! So you've no idea what the target audience is for an XB1X exclusive. How do you budget for that?

MS's 'never say never' stance may be open to the possibility, but realistically it's implausible.
 
If they enable the "X" as a new system, like I though for the original XBox One they should redesigned it as soon as possible to make it price competitive.
I mean a serious redesign, different hardware offering the same capabilities.
The "new" system may be launch as a proper next-gen offering BC. Still a weird strategy, lots of wasted efforts on a super niche user base, it would still smell of a cover-up for another bad strategy/decision.
 
AFAICS any game that can run on XB1X can run on XB1. Unless you want to set a minimum visual quality
Yea. This is something we should expect all the way through for the next foreseeable while until DXR is completely mainstream. Or the type of compute units change.

Those who bought an XB1X for 4K probably don't want to play future games in 1080p either
agreed.
Checkerboarding is something that is advertised but not used on the 1X however. The option is available to do 1080p -> 4KCBR.
I can't fathom the mindset of a dev who'd target XB1X but not XB1
The X1X is the power system for XBO, XB2 can be the power system for X1X, XBO drops off. X1X becomes the base model, XB2 slots itself as the powerhouse model.

There are some pros here from a developer perspective. It eases their transition period and gives them significantly longer with the SDK and can push the visual bar without feeling the loss of no audience.

If they enable the "X" as a new system, like I though for the original XBox One they should redesigned it as soon as possible to make it price competitive.
A proper generation from what i understand should last at least 6 years. That still means until Nov of 2019. XB2 can be announced for a 2020/2021 time frame in which users can skip X1X and go to XB2. But X1X purchasers aren’t going to be left out in the cold.
 
The X1X is the power system for XBO, XB2 can be the power system for X1X, XBO drops off. X1X becomes the base model, XB2 slots itself as the powerhouse model.
Except if a game runs on XB1X, it can be made to run well enough on XB1 (and PS4 and PS4Pro). The launch games for a next-gen, at least in the first year (past the really early up-ports etc), are impossible on the old gen without crazy amounts of work and a compromised experience. It's the improvement in games that gets everyone to upgrade. If the future hardware can't distance itself from previous hardware enough, it's not much of a generation. In a generation-less future, the devs will have to target based on install base and what they're trying to do. In the case of mobile for example, which spans huge numbers and huge diversity, a dev may choose a tour-de-force title to sell to the latest handset owners only, or something simpler that'll run on 4+ year old phones at a fraction of the power of the iPhone X. Same on PC - do you target 1070 minimum spec, or 1050, or integrated graphics? As there's not enough difference between XB1X and XB1 (and PS4 and PS4Pro) to make a game too much hassle to down-port, devs free to target the spec of their choice will surely target 100+ million current-gen boxes rather than just ~2 million XB1X's on top of next gen.

I'm not even convinced it'll provide a smoother transition, because first year, maybe even first week, sales of a next gen console will no doubt supersede the mid-gen box count. Xbox One sold 1 million in 24 hours and 2 million in 18 days. SDK - well, firstly there's nothing stopping the same core SDK being used, and secondly these things keep changing anyway and devs just have to adapt.

Okay, say I'm a boss of a largish dev looking to create a significant game, either current gen or next-gen. On the one hand, current gen offers a huge install base of over 100M units. On the other hand, I could be a medium sized fish in a small pond if I'm an early next-gen title distancing myself from past limitations, and sell to a significant portion of the first 5+ million next-gen console owners. What's the argument that I should target next-gen but also include XB1X but not scale down to the other consoles?
 
It's possible next-gen will have pretty slow adoption if all games continue to be made compatible with this gen, and X/Pro effectively prevented next gen from being a big improvement.

As soon as there are must-have exclusively on next-gen, the transition will accelerate quickly. It's a chicken and egg problem?
 
Yep. People won't care to upgrade if the improvements aren't worth it. Games won't target the high-end if there's no install base. Exactly like high-end-exclusive PC games; no-one's targeting the n million 1070+ owners because of the n*20 million lower-level install base. Console generations gave game developers a clear new focus and a clear leap forwards in software tech, and gave gamers something to look forwards to, jump onto when it happened, and catapult progress each time becaues game devs had that safety net knowing there'd be an audience for their investments. Without that impetus, the natural conclusion is a slow growth of hardware and software as there are no real drivers for either to progress.

In evolutionary terms, you need an extinction level event to clear room for new species. Otherwise you're tied to the old DNA and just get slight variations within the existing species. Console generations give us predictable meteors, with a clear history of their impact killing sales of old-gen games and advancing software ecosystems. The creation of a meteor-defeating laser array can only slow progress. At which point you have to take matters into your own hands and either spray the environment with mutagenic slime or get into genetic engineering to craft weird new species, culminating in an uncontrollable super-creature that slays all others and breeds via a weird airborne virus - that's not going to be good for the console industry.
 
I don't really agree with this. IMO, console holders want to hold onto their user base more than they want to incentivize new hardware purchase.

If their user base is large, active and spending, then yes. If not, then you want to attract a large, active and spending user base. People can change a lot in 5-7 years spanning a single generation. As people get older, they are more likely to settle down, start a family and spend less time and money gaming. People are generally, a finite dwindling revenue stream. Those that aren't, aren't the mainstream market.

New hardware was traditionally there to prevent the loss of users to a newer competing platform or to get new revenue streams going as a console generation died down due to obsolete hardware. But that basically meant rebooting your revenue stream each time you did that with an ensuing downturn in revenue as revenue slowly ramped up again during the generation. Additionally hard console generation resets risk losing users to the competition as there is no continuing legacy of investment in the platform.

A new console generation was also a great opportunity to attract more users. Sony had zero users before the original PlayStation. Microsoft attracted a metric ton of new users with Xbox 360. Those swings, and the changes those consoles brought to the console industry, could have been significantly less were consoles 'generationless'.

IMO, that's bad for the console holder and bad for developers and publishers.

It's also good as people with new hardware often buy new hardware. I remember when I was primarily a PC gamer and bought new hardware, more often than not I replayed old games at higher settings which did not benefit publishers or developers at all. If consoles become backwards compatible this will have an unpredictable impact on the economics of games development. I'm not convinced that impact will be good.

I have a massive Steam library and, like you, have a lot of games yet to play, many of which I bought cheap in sales which I'll get around to playing. This is far less of an option on console but Microsoft seem keen to bring this model to Xbox.

Ryse, a launch title for the current traditional generation didn't take into account any previous gen hardware when it was made and still looked next gen.
It didn't, but Ryse started out as a 360 Kinect game. :yes:

Scaling games down is much easier than scaling games up. Heck, the 5870 was also a radically different GPU arch. than what was in the XBO. It'd be another 2 GPU generations before GCN got its start.

As somebody who still writes a lot of code, this is 100% incorrect. It's much more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to scale code down to lower powered hardware. Sometimes you can cheat, or approximate and nobody really knows or you have to look really close to spot it.

It's strange that people think it's extraordinarily difficult to support older generations of hardware, when that has been done on PC for that past 2 decades. There's no secret sauce involved.

I can't speak for developers wider but I'd be quite surprised if the basic approach for most projects wasn't to start with the base level target and work upwards. Scaling down can be very difficult or result in some very unwelcome compromises and there is always a limit. The lowest supported specification for games will obviously vary, but it's only on the rise. It felt like a decade where PC games would get by with 2Gb of RAM, then it was quickly 4Gb and now it's 6Gb bare minimum and mostly 8Gb.

I don't want GTA VI limited by what PS4/Xbox One are technically capable of doing because that's too limited. I want Crackdown 3 level of destruction in more games without chancing the availability/reliability of cloud compute and with a load of NPCs and vehicles. A game I can play in five years and not worry if the server has closed down.
 
I just don't see what advantage the rolling generation provides over just allowing the market to dictate the pace that development shifts away from the prior gen and towards the new generation. With BC with improvements running prior gen titles for the new generation consoles, 1st party titles and 3rd parties looking to be a big fish in a small pond there would be incentive to buy into the new generation even while the prior gen is still being actively supported.
 
I just don't see what advantage the rolling generation provides over just allowing the market to dictate the pace that development shifts away from the prior gen and towards the new generation. With BC with improvements running prior gen titles for the new generation consoles, 1st party titles and 3rd parties looking to be a big fish in a small pond there would be incentive to buy into the new generation even while the prior gen is still being actively supported.

Rolling generations would operate in the market same as the current system has done. You can't really get away from what the market will support.
 
I just don't see what advantage the rolling generation provides over just allowing the market to dictate the pace that development shifts away from the prior gen and towards the new generation. With BC with improvements running prior gen titles for the new generation consoles, 1st party titles and 3rd parties looking to be a big fish in a small pond there would be incentive to buy into the new generation even while the prior gen is still being actively supported.
It's just a different model. I'm not necessarily confident that MS will be going that route, I just wanted to spring board you guys to let me know what does and does not make sense.

Part of me sees this as an exercise in just having the largest population possible. The other part of me looks at the success of some older titles, that are these legacy monsters that will be around forever, and that these long lasting monsters are more desirable to MS, than they would be to say Sony.

The idea of the new model is to further reinforce longer term support of games, have larger populations, possibly even device agnostic.

I often ask myself how this would be profitable to MS if they were to change the standard quo, just looking for ideas here, perhaps some unexplored territory. I know it' has to do with subscription, the mystery for me is trying to link subscriptions with this rolling generation concept.
 
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Couple questions:
Are older gamers more likely to stick to a particular ecosystem whereas younger gamers don't care or have moved on to mobile?
Where is the market shifting or how is it changing?
 
Except we don't even know how many XB1X's have been sold! So you've no idea what the target audience is for an XB1X exclusive.

I have absolutely no doubt that an Xbox One X exclusive, in all it's 6 TF glory, would do pretty well. No different than Ps5 launch exclusives will do pretty well!

There's a much smaller niche of core gamers that drives core gaming and software sales. Recent stat, 34 million PS Plus subscribers? Vs probably 80 million PS4's sold.

It's just, MS doesn't want to do that.

BTW

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2018/05/02/the-road-to-e3-2018/

Today, we’re witnessing a record-setting number of players, playing at record levels, and engaging in new ways. Xbox Live players are up 13 percent and Xbox One sales are up 15 percent over the same period last year,

+15% isn't barnburning but it's definitely not normal, and I think it's X1X for sure to thread title.

AND it's a $500 system with (allegedly) no (Xbox) exclusives! Should be selling zero...
 
I have absolutely no doubt that an Xbox One X exclusive, in all it's 6 TF glory, would do pretty well. No different than Ps5 launch exclusives will do pretty well!
A PS5 (or any console) launch title has 5+ million units reliable to sell to. Xbox One X has an unknown fraction of that. The cost of creating a 6 TF maximised game with relevant assets, would probably never be recovered. That's probably true of AAA console launch games too, but these catapult sales of the platform so the first party can invest. XB1X won't see massive sales in response to a game because by the time such a game is ready, people would rather just wait for XB2. So unless MS set XB1X as the next-gen and try to get people to buy into it as if its the next console, there's no reason to create XB1X exclusives for MS, and even less reason for 3rd parties.
 
Yep. People won't care to upgrade if the improvements aren't worth it. Games won't target the high-end if there's no install base. Exactly like high-end-exclusive PC games; no-one's targeting the n million 1070+ owners because of the n*20 million lower-level install base. Console generations gave game developers a clear new focus and a clear leap forwards in software tech, and gave gamers something to look forwards to, jump onto when it happened, and catapult progress each time becaues game devs had that safety net knowing there'd be an audience for their investments. Without that impetus, the natural conclusion is a slow growth of hardware and software as there are no real drivers for either to progress.

In evolutionary terms, you need an extinction level event to clear room for new species. Otherwise you're tied to the old DNA and just get slight variations within the existing species. Console generations give us predictable meteors, with a clear history of their impact killing sales of old-gen games and advancing software ecosystems. The creation of a meteor-defeating laser array can only slow progress. At which point you have to take matters into your own hands and either spray the environment with mutagenic slime or get into genetic engineering to craft weird new species, culminating in an uncontrollable super-creature that slays all others and breeds via a weird airborne virus - that's not going to be good for the console industry.
that post is golden. But I don't agree on the principle that if all of us have 1070 level hardware there will be a global extinction of old techniques. Because those extra resources the 1070 provides you with are needed to put them to good use, be it to run at better resolutions and/or better framerates.

I wasn't impressed with Demon Souls for the PlayStation until I saw it at 4k on PC (there is a DF video). It doesn't seem the same game! But the assets are real, those were the original assets. :oops:

The lack of resources and limitations led to ingenious performance tricks and great games that now can be played in their full glory.

That being said, the 1070 was always my dreamt GPU. I have a 1050Ti 4GB (laptop) and a 1060 3GB for my desktop computer. I mainly play on my laptop, which is the computer that I use the most.

It makes me the happiest person to have a 1050Ti instead of a 1060 and above on my laptop. Just because the laptop weighs 1.8Kg, and thermals and temperatures are usually great with the 1050Ti. I barely go above 60º, if ever, and I use a cooler base just in case, but most of the time it is turned off.
 
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