Sony are saying the UK allotment for PS4's was 300,000 all of which are gone. The next supply is in 3 days.
Business Approach Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox
- Thread starter BRiT
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They did hire a few "forwards compatible" guys a few years ago. So maybe Sony wants upgraded specs while maintaining compatibility as well?
Well their new "xb1" box would be an extension of the old one basically, so you could argue that the same engineering resources spent on the previous one can mostly carry over to the next one. It's not like there is esoteric hardware that cost billions to make which they have to throw away and start over, it's all mostly bog standard stuff. The xb1 already sells at a profit or break even so it's not like the past where they had to wait many years to just recoup launch costs. The new one could use similar tools and hardware, just beefed up versions. I almost think they may have to do this because a tablet running at two manufacturing nodes ahead of a console will start to become serious competition. I just can't imagine them lasting 7 to 8 years on the new console hardware, it's too outdated to last that long.
They have to be doing that already. With Intel seemingly able to maintain their high end spot with the greatest of ease and every new Arm based apu iteration jumping gpu performance by 40% at a time, Amd is basically squeezed out of the high end and low end markets right now and the noose keeps getting tighter. I'd be really be surprised if Amd wasn't focusing anything and everything they have on new Apu's. When it comes to long term survival that's where they need to be as they can't challenge the high end or low end of the market at the moment, nor in the foreseeable future. The money is in low power do it all apu's anyways, at least that's where it's predicted future market expansion will be. Intel isn't quite there yet but they are racing towards it at a rapid clip and presumably will be the first to 14nm and smaller, so they have an edge on everyone else as they enter the low power apu race with a vengeance. What else can Amd be doing right now?
scooby_dooby
Legend
It wouldn't fit with MS's track record to be so aggressive. Most of the money made is made in those later years, and refreshing hardware seriously cuts into those margins, and at diminishing returns since dev's must still target the original hardware. And MS has shown a keen eye for profits, ever since the start of last generation.
I could imagine a single upgrade maybe in 4-5 yrs, but nothing sooner.
I could imagine a single upgrade maybe in 4-5 yrs, but nothing sooner.
If your track record isn't maximising profits and staving off the competition, it'd be wise to change tactics. No company is locked to doing things the same way, especially when it experiences a significant leadership change.
Why are they beefing up the XB1? I thought the whole point was point was that the jump from 720 - 900P to 1080 is not as relevant or even noticeable as the the need to address the UI and bring motion and voice controls. Updating graphics as you say is entirely possible but I don't see this as their focus. MS more likely to spend the next couple years optimizing their motion and voice controls and actually presenting a compelling reason why their approach was right to begin with.
They are all playing Ryse.
Show them all.
PC 118,576
PS3 82,727
360 78,078
XBOne 30,561
PS4 44,526
Does that seem likely to you to be an accurate representation of the relative number of players playing this game on those platforms? It doesn't to me.
All those that plays on 360 xb1 and ps4 would need to pay for multiplayer access, right?
That's exactly right about the not noticeable part, all the more reason why it's possible that tablets, phones, and other devices not stuck on older monolithic release schedules can catch up to what consoles can display as they only have to be "close enough" to them visually to be considered just as good, and especially when said devices will be using Intel's best and smallest production nodes while the consoles will be stuck on whatever Amd can offer. Kinect and all the other stuff MS has is what will help them weather that attack but they should be prepared in case it doesn't play out that way. Like what if in 2 to 3 years people tire of consoles and new sales nosedive because their other devices are good enough game players offering similar visuals at 1280x720 which we've seen in the lab as often being good enough for most. They should be ready to offer something new and fully backward compatible for that very possible scenario. I don't think a more frequent release schedule is the death knell of the product, everything else out there operates that way and it helps keep the product fresh. Consoles and their stupidly long release cycles just become horridly stale products after a while. This can be profitable for MS as well since they have switched to loss-less pricing, so refreshing the Xbox line does not mean losing money anymore. Finally from the sound of it they have kept backward compatibility in mind this time so they are in a perfect position to switch to a new style release schedule.
Yep. Considering the install base, the One and PS4 are doing pretty well on that chart.
Inconceivably so, I would argue. There's no way that the total number of players playing BF4 on PS4 is greater than 50% of the number playing it on PS3, for example.
Well it is online stats, I am sure many choose to play the single-player only.
The Xbox One project was hundreds of millions to potentially billions of dollars, so I would be curious how much of that is "mostly", especially since releasing a new console quickly will hamper the earlier console's ability to maintain volume and pricing.
Unless you expect it to immediately stop making Xbox Ones, which just means Microsoft is perpetually stuck with a console that never has a chance to recoup its up front cost.
Bog standard silicon has pretty high up front costs. Those fearsome tablets use silicon chips that must sell hundreds of thousands or millions of units to make up for the design, validation, and manufacturing costs.
If you mean creating an even more powerful APU, for example, it is a new chip and will incur much of the cost that went into Durango.
One thing to note is that AMD's little back and forth with Sony, itself, and Microsoft did mean that some of hoped-for cost savings in R&D already happened.
I'm also not sure in this scenario if you are envisioning a rapid retirement of Durango when Durango Redux comes out.
Any new hardware means incurring new up front costs. Giving Durango something over a year to pay off its up-front costs doesn't seem to be consistent with Microsoft's publically stated plans, at any rate.
The consoles have an order of magnitude more power headroom to work with, and they have dedicated more silicon up-front. It would take multiple node transitions to match the transistor count, and with the current trends power efficiency would be nowhere near good enough to make up for the higher TDP.
If they do find a way around that problem, the problem becomes the console hardware model. With all the talk about cloud gaming and making the hardware irrelevant, it seems to already be one.
The mobile platforms will have the volumes to justify more frequent hardware transitions, or likely the smaller number of future tablet hardware platforms will have the hundreds of millions of units annually versus tens of millions of consoles over years.
