Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[Clukos]

What does Horizon render at anyway on Pro? Some 2K checkerboard?

2K = 1080p

If you meant 1440p, no game is doing 1440p checkerboard on Ps4 Pro, it's either 1800c (1600x1800 per frame) or 2160c (1920x2160 per frame). Horizon is doing 2160c.

 

[Nisaaru]

Historically cheaper consoles do well is a proven fact. As you said, PS3 had BR on it's side and yet it was still too expensive.

You mean like Gamecube which Nintendo tried to sell for 99USD/79Euro to compete vs PS2/XBox? Didn't work out so well and they changed their strategy to sell overpriced recycled/low R&D products starting with the Wii.

 

[mosen]

Revenue is not profit.



This is fanboy nonsense. This is GAF level logic. You know it's bullshit. Profit = revenue - costs and is that is how Boards of directors measure commercial success. Particularly money people where the bottom line tells all.

So selling more consoles and having bigger market share is nonsense, too?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

If Microsoft perceive success by market share rather than net profitably then they are beyond fucked. Without a clear sustainable plan for monetizing market share, chasing this is throwing money away. But Microsoft are desperate to secure a new sustainable growth market to replace Windows and it's possible that Microsoft's executive team has convinced their board that gaming is worth further investment.

I'm not so sure that's how I would characterize things for Microsoft. If anything, it's probably more accurate to say they are doubling down on Windows. What they are attempting to do, however, is diversify the hardware and markets that Windows applies to. But at its core, Windows will still drive everything.

At one point they were experimenting with diversification at the OS level. They had a fledgling Android phone product using the Nokia brand using a Windows GUI, for example. But that has since been abandoned.

That probably wouldn't be that a hard sell since Microsoft has a weird board makeup with almost half of the board coming from VC/finance industries where conventional wisdom is in taking insane risks - despite decades of financial market instability caused wholly by systematic stupid investments. No other large tech company has so many 'money people' on their board. Not Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Cisco, Twitter, Oracle, Intel or Samsung. It is very unusual and probably explains some of Microsoft's decisions like buying Minecraft and Nokia. Bang or bust!

Yes and this unfortunately means that the board of directors isn't happy with Microsoft making billions in profits every year. They want to see growth (investors always want to see growth). It isn't good enough to be profitable and successful, but there needs to be growth. And not just growth (profits grew during much of Ballmer's tenure, for example), but they want to see BIG growth.

It's a rather unfortunate situation for them. It's also unfortunate that Gates is no longer the chairman of the board, although he at least holds the title of technology advisor.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So selling more consoles and having bigger market share is nonsense, too?

That's console war success, not business success.

If you're a Sega fan given control of a new Sega console, you'd want it to sell 200 million and be the greatest console ever.

If you're a businessman given control of Sega and a new console, you'd want it to generate a billion dollars a year profit, whether that's from selling loads of consoles or selling expensive subscriptions or having your console credit-card operated and only selling to billionaires.

 

[mosen]

That's console war success, not business success.

People use this metrics in console wars but they are not unrelated to business success though. I expect the company that has more users or sells more consoles to have higher revenue/profit.

Selling more consoles or having more active users means higher number of potential buyers. However, software and services are the biggest sources of profit.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PS3 sold a lot more units than GC, but lost Sony money versus Nintendo making money. The aim is to make profits, and the measure of success for business is profits. To do that you want install base, but install base itself isn't success if it isn't profitable so shouldn't be counted.

 

[goonergaz]

You mean like Gamecube which Nintendo tried to sell the Gamecube for 99USD/79Euro to compete vs PS2/XBox? Didn't work out so well and they changed their strategy to sell overpriced recycled/low R&D products starting with the Wii.

One whole example? A console which launched when Sony were killing it and Nintendo coming off a complete failure?

I'm sure for every solid argument there will be some examples that 'break the trend'

FTR Wii was cheap, however it was also a bit of a blip on the gaming/console landscape because it brought in a completely new generation of people who didn't like to game so a bit of a curve ball

 

[chris1515]

PS3 sold a lot more units than GC, but lost Sony money versus Nintendo making money. The aim is to make profits, and the measure of success for business is profits. To do that you want install base, but install base itself isn't success if it isn't profitable so shouldn't be counted.

PS4 will probably be the most profitable console of Sony and it will sold less than PS2 because of digital sales, network subscription and not bleeding money on hardware...

 

[arijoytunir]

On the GPU side, Raven Ridge will feature the brand new Vega GPU architecture. A total of 11 Vega GPU cores are featured on Raven Ridge. This rounds up to 704 stream processors which is a nice increase over 512 cores on Bristol Ridge. These small Vega cores would help boost the performance of integrated graphics processing on such chips. We can expect prices for these chips under the sub-$250 US range.http://wccftech.com/amd-pinnacle-ri...firmed/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Amd raven ridge apu consists of 4 zen cores and 11 cus of vega gpu... hence it looks afterall scorpio wont have zen ... maybe zen semi custom designs are not yet ready

 

[mrcorbo]

They are most definitely charting their success by subscribers at this point in time. The game pass will also be a big factor for these guys.

I'd amend this to them charting their success by active users. How many consoles you sold < how many users are currently engaged with your revenue-generating services (including Live/PSN subscriptions). Increasing this latter number is the most important goal and everything else is a means to that end.

 

[iroboto]

Revenue is not profit.
Profit = revenue - costs and is that is how Boards of directors measure commercial success. Particularly money people where the bottom line tells all.

Interesting, of all the commentary I've ever posted on this board, I didn't think you'd get worked up about this one lol. I think we're at an impasse due to conflicting ideologies, so I'll address that gap.

In reference to my original comment which you've responded with:

This is fanboy nonsense. This is GAF level logic. You know it's bullshit.

This is also cynicism, and you can always respond to any of my commentary this way, and frankly I've no way to work with it.
My original commentary about Subscribers as being the main metric (at MS) I assumed was an established fact that we've all discussed last year (March 2016), when Phil Spencer stopped with sales figures as began only publishing MAUs (Monthly Active Users) for XBL. Since it's apparent to me now that this wasn't established, I'll establish this now, and I'll go a step further to show that what Phil is saying it not necessary spin, but a new direction for MS (since Satya) and thus important that they measure their health through MAUs.

In March 2016 Phil made the commentary:

"The number of people in the last 30 days that have engaged with an Xbox Live game on either Windows or Xbox 360 or Xbox One is the critical factor for our team to gauge our success, because that's what our partners want. Our partners and gamers, they want the largest collection of active gamers who are buying and playing games," he told attendees.

"That is the health metric of any service that you want to talk about. What's your monthly active users in the space? It's not how many consoles I sell. If I sold a console two years ago and now it's in the closet collecting dust, that's not good for the gamers."

Which was met with a lot of cynicism across the industry, largely impart because people saw this as goal post moving (in some invisible console war game). But this move was actually directly targeting shareholders and investors and I'll explain more on that fact later. This language and directional shift followed other shifts in objectives at MS in particular the move to Office 365, which follows their cloud based Azure subscriptions.

In the article Why Wallstreet loves Subscription Models the 3 reasons they put up are:

1. Investors Value Growth
2. Investors Value Visibility
3. Investors Value Metrics

I'm not going to quote the whole article, but I will quote their quotes
1. Investors Value Growth

When you have a recurring revenue business model, you rarely miss your monthly or quarterly numbers by more than 10-20%. Your forecasting process is much more accurate. At the beginning of the quarter, you start with a base to grow from rather than begin at zero. In a SaaS or subscription software business, you can predict your churn rate and new business closings to determine your growth rate. The management team and the investors are thus rarely surprised by major fluctuations in your results. Venture Capitalist Jeff Bussgang

2. Investors Value Visibility

“Predictability and visibility means you can manage your expenses more precisely relative to your revenue. One of the hard things about lumpy revenue models is that until literally midnight on the last day of the quarter, you don’t know how you did. Which means it is hard to ramp up or down expenses smoothly to match revenues. Ramping expenses up and down is a sticky process because it usually involves people and there are many friction points, delays and costs as well as externalities (such as morale) when you try to rapidly ramp down expenses in a quarter as a result of lower-than-anticipated revenue.”Venture Capitalist Jeff Bussgang

3. Investors Value Metrics (directly addressing your point about Profits being the only important number)

Of course a healthy operating profit is the main goal of any successful enterprise, but it’s actually very poor indicator of the value of a growing subscription-based business.

In fact, many of today’s more sophisticated investors would punish a subscription business that brought its operating profit to the bottom line, seeing it as a signal that the company cutting sales and marketing spending because it can’t efficiently acquire new bookings.

Wall Street now understands how to assess subscription finances beyond simple income statements. Investors are starting to look beyond the widget-based financial analysis to assess subscription vendor’s financial strength.

You've indicated that shareholders only see profits but I will show you that is not true, in particular I will show you a case study (so not theory) and then I will show you theory. Adobe provides a case study for when they switched to SaaS and the article writes:

At least initially, market did not receive the news well. There was some debate as to whether the company should halt trading. But despite an 8% decline of overall revenue (but with a near doubling of subscription revenue) Adobe stock soared 55% in 2013.

Now to the theory, Metrics in SaaS are not the same as standard business models.
In a SaaS white paper you can apply for at Zuora here is how SaaS are evaluated:

When you actually plot the numbers it looks like this:

You'll notice that Net Income is 0.

So the three key metrics here:
Churn Rate
Recurring Profit Margins
Growth Efficiency

In particular again, look at the difference be tween Net Income being positive and Net Income being 0. When you are optimized for growth your AAR is now increased.

The strategy behind growth is the following:

Alternatively, if we’re bullish on our future potential, we could invest all $30 in growth. If our Growth E ciency is 1:1, that means we’ll book $30 in net new recurring revenue over the course of the year, leaving us with $130 in Annual Recurring Revenue to start the next year. Now, we’ve got no profits today, but if we run this play year over year, we’re growing by 30% annually. With an infusion of capital from investors, you’ll have more than $30 to invest, so you can juice that growth rate as long as you can maintain an efficient Growth E efficiency ratio.

When the time comes to nally start taking profits, you’re working off of a much bigger recurring revenue stream! Now when you see Wall Street analysts complaining that companies like Salesforce. com spend too much on sales and marketing and aren’t very profitable, you’ll know better. In fact, when profits do start to increase, look for growth to actually slow down.

So hopefully this addresses your comment. If you still feel my stuff is GAF level bull shit please let me know, but I want to be clear, even in my Corporation we've switched to a scorecard based system when we report out to our shareholders. Things like Customer Service satisfaction and items like that are on the scorecard. We just need to create metrics that shareholders will agree to hold us to.

It's one thing to say your business is going to do something, and it's another thing entirely when you put it on a scorecard.

Last but not least, MS has the vault of money to continually invest in growth for a very long period of time, while other Silicon Valley based companies will eventually run out of investor money and need to slow growth to gain profits. I was going to bring in the SiV model, i.e. Twitter doesn't view how many accounts as being a good metric (since a lot of them are bots).. but anyway, I think you get the point. These companies get evaluation based on the size of their user groups.

 

[iroboto]

I'd amend this to them charting their success by active users. How many consoles you sold < how many users are currently engaged with your revenue-generating services (including Live/PSN subscriptions). Increasing this latter number is the most important goal and everything else is a means to that end.

agreed, will amend. I actually forgot the quote that phil wrote at the time and that's what was off the top of my head.

 

[mosen]

PS3 sold a lot more units than GC, but lost Sony money versus Nintendo making money. The aim is to make profits, and the measure of success for business is profits. To do that you want install base, but install base itself isn't success if it isn't profitable so shouldn't be counted.

Are you sure that GC make more money than PS3?

Making profit is the main goal of every business but you can't evaluate the success of every business only based on its current profit. Increasing install base has long term benefits for these companies since they can use it in different ways for their next product.

Sony saved its 3rd Party partners and expanded its studios & games and introduced/improved their online/offline services last generation. They build PS4 on top of what they learned/spend on PS3 generation. Their aim was to make profit and they do it now.

Also I think that PS3 was profitable in the last 4-3 years of last generation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

IIRC (and I may not!) the losses on PS3 in the first years were billions, such that future profits only enabled it to break even.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'd also like to add that companies do care about market share and it can be one of the metrics they use to measure their health in a marketplace. It's not the only thing, but it can be one of many. It doesn't mean you need the majority of the share. But most companies want growth and market shares is one of the ways they track and measure it. It can also be seen as a sign of stability by buyers in some industry, so maintaining a market share position can be important. That is probably true in gaming for developers. They must do the math of cost of development vs potential sales. I would expect that Scorpio probably has growth targets, and one of those is probably based on something like market share.

 

[wco81]

Marketshare matters for getting third-party support.

But a console could have 30-40% share and still have a large enough installed base to attract almost all the 3rd-party games that a rival console with a 20% greater market share has.

As long as it reaches an installed base of say 30 million.

In other markets, that number can be much less. iPhone has maybe 10-15% marketshare but gets most of the profits in the industry. And that marketshare still translates to 200-300 million units sold per year. It has no problems getting software support despite the small market share. iPhone owners tend to spend more on apps. and services, which is another reason for the third-party support.

 

[chris1515]

The best is to be in Sony Interactive entertainement position with PS1, PS2 or better PS4 situation, large marketshare and huge profit...

 

[mrcorbo]

IIRC (and I may not!) the losses on PS3 in the first years were billions, such that future profits only enabled it to break even.

Cell was a financial disaster and, IIRC, PlayStation division got stuck with that bill. When I get a chance I'll try to dig up the old posts about that stuff.

 

[Cyan]

perfect to create some intimacy.