fingers crossed they acquire SEGA and finally make all of SEGAs back catalog backwards compatible with the current consoles, honestly its the 3rd biggest thing I would be most excited about for if they did acquire SEGA, just behind all of Relics games coming to gamepass on day 1 and killer instinct possibly being made by AM2 (who do virtua fighter)
Fingers indeed crossed for that...well, maybe better I should say, if it trends that way to where an acquisition is going to happen, then I'd be cool with it. Not necessarily hoping or wishing for them to occur tbh but given companies like Microsoft are in a phase of wanting to make acquisitions, companies like SEGA fit their business strategy for console market expansion, particularly in Asian regions, and in terms of publisher consistency SEGA are arguably the most consistent in the industry going by aggregate review averages (I just wish they did more marketing for a lot of their games).
I was thinking, even if an acquisition doesn't happen, Microsoft could partner with SEGA the way they did with OG Xbox, and why not get AM2 & Atlus to make a new Fighters Megamix, only this time with a ton of Microsoft characters thrown in too? Sonic, Yakuza, Persona, DOOM, Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Pinata, Killer Instinct, Master Chief etc. characters all in one fighting game Megamix-style but modernized would be super awesome.
Right now Tencent is in a period of growth, at this point in time it doesn't make sense for them to meddle in any of their acquisitions, if they did it would potentially put other companies off from taking investment from Tencent, restricting, or at least retarding their growth potential. However there is a limit to their growth, a limit that I think they are rapidly approaching. Pretty soon regulators in the west will start to act against Tencent's acquisitions like the regulators in china are seemingly starting to do. Tencent has played very fast and loose for a long time and has been criticized by Chinese regulators for not properly notifying the government of some of their acquisitions and investments. Combined with the crackdown that china seems to be pursuing against the home grown tech giants and I cant see a world were Tencent isn't reigned in a bit. Combine this with growing anti-chinese sentiment, or at least skepticism in the west (not saying this is OK to be clear, but it is a thing that will affect them) I think Tencent's days of incredibly rapid growth are coming to an end. In combination with this, the game studio market seems to be in a bubble right now, in my opinion, what happens when the bubble bursts and Tencent's innumerable investments loose a good portion of their value? The capital that Tencent uses for its expansion dries up.
Bit of a long winded explanation leading to my point
If Tencent is restricted from buying any appreciable number of new studios there is no way to increase revenue besides increasing the revenue produced by their existing studios, which of course is possible, and I am sure will happen, but there is a limit to how much they can increase the revenue generated on a per title basis. The biggest single surefire way for Tencent to increase its revenue by a good margin is to start its own store. Immediately they don't have to fork over 30% of their revenue to a third party. Tencent starting its own store and locking their content to it in some way is inevitable at this point. Its will be the only way for them to increase revenue in the future. Once they are done growing inorganically tencent will start meddling
I had no idea Tencent actually went behind Chinese regulator's backs to make acquisitions without the CCP's knowledge, very interesting. I always thought Tencent's actions had the full support of the CCP and knowledge from the CCP beforehand, so that's really interesting to hear.
Given all of what you mentioned, it'd seem circumstances within the next five years (maybe even next 3 years) could see them taking the next step and producing a storefront to capitalize their investments on. And possibly pairing that with a Steambox-like device or at least some Apple TV-like device too. The more interesting question would be if they try distributing such outside of China, particularly in the West, and if so do they do it themselves or license it out to another company to handle distribution & marketing in those regions.
This isnt the first time that xbox was pushed in china, I have no idea how committed they were at the start of the xbox one gen but they did release the console in china. And iirc they even had an included set of office apps for the xbox so that the console could be sold as a 'computing device' and not a games console, which iirc were heavily restricted from sale at the time
Lol they've already done this before eh? Something in me thinks they could make this work again in the future, but not necessarily by slapping office apps and services to an Xbox. I'm thinking more in terms of leveraging Xbox tech in a Surface-style device.
I largely agree, however I do think there is a good chance that tencent would use intel / AMD for any potential console. Tencent are already partnered with AMD for their tencent cloud offering. As a counterpoint and to give support to your theory tencent has a partnership with Huawei for cloud gaming already. Whether that means that Huawei is making the actual chips or its just a tech partnership remains to be seen.
Link to the Tencent and Huawei partnership announcement
Tencent and Huawei Join for Cloud Gaming | COGconnected
Also interesting; well, Tencent going with AMD doesn't do anything for Intel xD, but if we're talking more about a new player entering the mainstream big console market as a platform holder it'd seem Tencent has more of a means in laying groundwork to doing that than I originally realized.
Nintendo got hopelessly tied up to nvidia for anything but a hard transition without BC, the moment they got paid to not only provide the chip but also the vertical integration of the Switch's SDK.
Fortunately for them, the Switch is a major sales success so the surplus of money is probably enough to keep everyone happy no matter what.
Hmmm...could Nintendo have possibly gone with PowerVR, NXP etc. for designs or partnerships of a mobile-based device if they were particularly weary of Nvidia? Maybe they would've been worried about securing large enough volumes with those options, but there had to be other options out there. In hindsight they lucked out going with Nvidia, hopefully that good relationship perserveres.
As for Intel being in a next-gen console, I don't see why not.
At the moment they're also just another client of TSMC so it's not like they can say "our factories are too valuable to make low-margin SoCs for consoles".
Well there's apparently a thing of them opening up two new fab plants in the U.S for 7nm, which seems like a good move. It will allow them to rely less on TSMC, and give them potential clientele for 7nm wafer production depending on how good their capacities will be.
They do need competitive CPU and GPU architectures, though. But by the time the next-gen consoles start their development (2023-2025?) ARM should already have very high performance cores derived of the X1 architecture, and Qualcomm will probably have the fruits of their Nuvia acquisition. Competition will hopefully be quite fierce at that point.
Yeah, definitely true. But my question is, WHO is going to go to Intel to set up a deal for such a console using their tech? Outside of smaller companies like say exa-Arcadia, Intellivision, Atari etc. who is there? Or maybe, Intel makes a play themselves? That would be interesting to see, but it'd have to be something closer to a Steambox-style business model I reckon, providing some consolized PC alternative.