Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[Scott_Arm]

I doubt they'll do it, but I'm hoping it'll be like that windows phone that lets you switch to the full windows desktop. Of course the console would only run UWP apps, but it might still be nice to have a full desktop option if a lot of good stuff starts to hit the windows store.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I doubt they'll do it, but I'm hoping it'll be like that windows phone that lets you switch to the full windows desktop. Of course the console would only run UWP apps, but it might still be nice to have a full desktop option if a lot of good stuff starts to hit the windows store.

I am definitely anticipating this, if not at launch then soon thereafter. It Scorpio's hardware is capable of offering a decent Windows experience (and it certainly should) then Microsoft would have to be shortsighted not to find a way to shoehorn Windows onto the hardware. The best Microsoft can do to slow Window's demise (given the ever increasing capabilities of non-Windows mobile devices) is to make it easy to get and use Windows on other hardware. Particularly their own.

Government departments we work with are deploying web-apps and Mac quite widely. Unthinkable just 5 years ago but it's actually easier to secure one cloud platform than keep 500,000 individual Windows machines secured.

 

[eloic]

If an official logo, it's...daring. Why a Scorpion? Why Scorpio? Scorpio sounds like a Bond villain or criminal organisation and that logo kinda suits. Techno-terrorist organisation travelled back in time to undermine society? Fine as a random project name but not IMO consumer friendly, not even for a niche. 'Scorpion' doesn't really smack of powerful gaming hardware.

If one stung you maybe you will reconsider your concept of "powerful". ;-)

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Maybe somebody on the team was a Scorpio.

Or maybe someone had visited some place with scorpions. Or maybe they think the association of something which could be lethal would confer the notion of power.

Not dissimilar to the way some cars have been named, like a Cobra or a Stingray.

It's far simpler than that and has already been discussed in this thread. Scorpio as an astrological sign is between Oct. 23 and Nov. 22. Project Scorpio is targeting a launch within that timeframe. Whether they make the target launch or not, we'll have to wait and see.

If they don't do this however, it should be obvious to them that any new product Apple or Google releases that expands those competing platforms to new devices, Microsoft's platform comes under threat further. So even if you weren't paying attention to Microsoft's platform developments in the last few years, it should be obvious that there is no where else to go, and the only reason Microsoft didn't get there sooner is because a certain Microsoft boss was being silly and stubborn (or greedy).

This is something that's popular to mention, but not all that true. Most of what we see in Microsoft now, started under Ballmer's leadership. UWP, Windows on Arm, Surface, HoloLens, etc. More importantly Xbox as a unified experience. That last, however, was problematic as the head of Xbox at the time, Don Mattrick was still of the opinion that Xbox should be a separate OS from Windows. However, compromises were made. The UI was largely influenced by Windows Metro design language. And work had started for UWP (in a slightly different form from UWP as it is now) app. integration.

What Ballmer was, however, was representing the old guard of Microsoft. He wasn't under the control of the investors, and he'd been at the helm when technically good products had launch, but received a lot of negative publicity. Vista for instance is a solid OS and upgrade over Windows XP. But bad drivers by certain companies completely ruined its image (similar to Windows XP at launch). Windows 7, which was basically just Vista with a new skin launch to critical acclaim, although it was basically just Vista. At a time when iOS (highly profitable) and Android (marginally profitable) were taking market share, albeit not sales (at the time), away from Windows, that all combined to make him less popular with the investors.

If anything, Ballmer was a more conservative businessman than a risk taking businessman. As Dsoup mentioned previously, Investors sometimes like big risk if it can result in big rewards. Explosive growth can dramatically drive share prices up, while conservative growth doesn't. Ballmer was the antithesis of what the investors from financial instituations on the Board of Directors wanted (high risk, high reward) but favored by members of the board who wanted stability and conservative growth like Bill Gates. And you can't blame him for being that way, Microsoft's largest revenue generators, small business and corporations, value stability over the volatility that can come with high risk/high reward strategies.

It should be noted that it was those same financial investors that started the push to get Ballmer out of office, and not the traditional people you'd see on the Board of Directors (like at say Apple or Google).

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

This is something that's popular to mention, but not all that true. Most of what we see in Microsoft now, started under Ballmer's leadership. UWP, Windows on Arm, Surface, HoloLens, etc. More importantly Xbox as a unified experience. That last, however, was problematic as the head of Xbox at the time, Don Mattrick was still of the opinion that Xbox should be a separate OS from Windows. However, compromises were made. The UI was largely influenced by Windows Metro design language. And work had started for UWP (in a slightly different form from UWP as it is now) app. integration.

What Ballmer was, however, was representing the old guard of Microsoft. He wasn't under the control of the investors, and he'd been at the helm when technically good products had launch, but received a lot of negative publicity. Vista for instance is a solid OS and upgrade over Windows XP. But bad drivers by certain companies completely ruined its image (similar to Windows XP at launch). Windows 7, which was basically just Vista with a new skin launch to critical acclaim, although it was basically just Vista. At a time when iOS (highly profitable) and Android (marginally profitable) were taking market share, albeit not sales (at the time), away from Windows, that all combined to make him less popular with the investors.

If anything, Ballmer was a more conservative businessman than a risk taking businessman. As Dsoup mentioned previously, Investors sometimes like big risk if it can result in big rewards. Explosive growth can dramatically drive share prices up, while conservative growth doesn't. Ballmer was the antithesis of what the investors from financial instituations on the Board of Directors wanted (high risk, high reward) but favored by members of the board who wanted stability and conservative growth like Bill Gates. And you can't blame him for being that way, Microsoft's largest revenue generators, small business and corporations, value stability over the volatility that can come with high risk/high reward strategies.

It should be noted that it was those same financial investors that started the push to get Ballmer out of office, and not the traditional people you'd see on the Board of Directors (like at say Apple or Google).

Regards,
SB

This is a good add to Arwin's post. It's true a lot of this development (we see today) did start under Ballmer. Satya has been leading the charge of moving MS into SaaS, and those moves have resulted in opening up Windows (finally), albeit slowly, but I never thought the day would come when I could bash in Windows. Nor did I ever expect to see any variant of Visual Studio on Mac.

Microsoft as a company has changed a lot since Ballmer though, I do want to give Satya some credit on that front. It's true Ballmer was conservative, and MS was quite boring, but lately they've been more exciting, much more so than ever. As with the sentiment above me, I also hope that energy will hop over to XBOX and complete this movement they are moving towards.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

This is a good add to Arwin's post. It's true a lot of this development (we see today) did start under Ballmer. Satya has been leading the charge of moving MS into SaaS, and those moves have resulted in opening up Windows (finally), albeit slowly, but I never thought the day would come when I could bash in Windows. Nor did I ever expect to see any variant of Visual Studio on Mac.

I can't see that any of this relates to how Microsoft want to distribute and charge (or not) for Window? There have been Bash builds for Windows since the 90s. SaaS works when you control desired software so you can decide how it is made available but Microsoft don't control most of the games on Xbox. I don't know how it's working out for EA (and it is available only on one platform) but I can't see many publishers being keen to make new releases available for inclusion in Microsoft's sub model, it's really a way to skim a little extra income on older titles that are past their sales prime. If you look at Ubisoft and Activisions numbers, if you're licensing a $60 game at a sub-Microsoft-monthly-rental fee that's a loss unless that game is rented consistently for what, 7-8 months?, by every potential purchaser. Hmmm..

 

[Silent_Buddha]

This is a good add to Arwin's post. It's true a lot of this development (we see today) did start under Ballmer. Satya has been leading the charge of moving MS into SaaS, and those moves have resulted in opening up Windows (finally), albeit slowly, but I never thought the day would come when I could bash in Windows. Nor did I ever expect to see any variant of Visual Studio on Mac.

Microsoft as a company has changed a lot since Ballmer though, I do want to give Satya some credit on that front. It's true Ballmer was conservative, and MS was quite boring, but lately they've been more exciting, much more so than ever. As with the sentiment above me, I also hope that energy will hop over to XBOX and complete this movement they are moving towards.

The biggest change is that while under Ballmer and before him Gates, Microsoft would generally hold R&D under wraps until there was a product with a defined market to address. That was both good and bad. Good in that the product in generally would be solid (X360 if not for the change from leaded to lead free solder, would have been a very solid and reliable product). The bad is that more nimble companies can beat them to the market with innovative products (Microsoft losing massive share in the phone market as they were slow to transition Windows CE phone OS into more full modern Smartphone OS, for example).

Under Satya, everything is the same except R&D is being pushed to release a product before a market exists. HoloLens is a great example of this. Under Ballmer and Gates, we'd still know little to nothing about HoloLens. Project Scorpio likely wouldn't have been announced at last year's E3. It's too early to tell whether this would be good or bad. At the very least it opens up to the public more of the R&D that Microsoft has been doing. On the other hand, if product isn't released and a market for said product isn't found, they could end up with egg on their face. As well, by pushing development of Windows onto far faster iterations, Windows has lost much of the stability (assuming Windows hardware partners don't provide crap drivers to compromise stability as with XP and Vista) and polish that it has had up until Windows 10. And don't even get me started on how Edge still needs a lot more development time to be a suitable replacement for IE.

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

I can't see that any of this relates to how Microsoft want to distribute and charge (or not) for Window? There have been Bash builds for Windows since the 90s. SaaS works when you control desired software so you can decide how it is made available but Microsoft don't control most of the games on Xbox. I don't know how it's working out for EA (and it is available only on one platform) but I can't see many publishers being keen to make new releases available for inclusion in Microsoft's sub model, it's really a way to skim a little extra income on older titles that are past their sales prime. If you look at Ubisoft and Activisions numbers, if you're licensing a $60 game at a sub-Microsoft-monthly-rental fee that's a loss unless that game is rented consistently for what, 7-8 months?, by every potential purchaser. Hmmm..

Right. Well it's a different model as well. Since we are unsure how publishers are paid through this model I can't really comment, but it could be good because some games never ever get sales after their first month.

As per your earlier indications, financially I think Satya saw the writing on the wall for MS in general and made a call to change or watch MS slide into oblivion like RIM/Blackberry did; a monopoly to irrelevant. All these moves which have been somewhat fast show to me at least that their current model wasn't working for them. Office was down, Windows was down, Xbox was down. The moves we see to SaaS may very well be the acknowledgement that MS will never (likely ever) hold that type of monopoly over the markets again, and that it was time to change MS to adapt to the change of pace, market, and ultimately to keep MS afloat. Their software is now everywhere, and they've been moving to platform agnostic, though I see that they are still pushing for Windows 10, but I mean they are available everywhere.

The moves for XBOX may very well be the same. They don't play the traditional game very good (lately? not sure tbh, I was a PC gamer and more or less did not invest much in the 360 gen), so they may have made a choice to change (I think post E3 this will be more clear).
But earlier in this thread we talked about cancellations, and studio closures. That money was there at one point in time, and it got re-purposed. We see funding into Game Pass, funding into BC, funding into BEAM, and possibly other services of technologies we may not be aware of. And so it's entirely possible, that MS doesn't want to play the 1P game as much, their biggest 3 franchises don't nearly sell as well as they used to, they may just be prioritizing their money where MS is actually skilled at. If you can't ever beat your competitors at their game, I guess it makes sense to change the game so that you can succeed at it.

They're just pivoting as any company should pivot when they are not getting the returns they want.

And since we're on the topic of studio closures, earlier there was discussion about the closure of DriveClub studio. It was bad, they got bad backlash. But what if Sony had a choice between giving these guys another game to make, or re-purpose this money for lengthening the runway for Horizon Zero Dawn and GOW development (we have no idea what the money was done, just making shit up). But if it were true, would people be less upset about the closure seeing the final HZD product for example.

Without that transparency it's really hard to know, but in the end if their customer bases are satisfied then I assume the right business decisions were made.

 

[ProspectorPete]

I don't know who came up with this (I believe Xbox fans and media at the time(s) ), but

"the strongest platform never wins!"

That probably doesn't count if the preferred platform is the strongest right?

Anyway, I figured nobody want to get too far ahead of the other team as more powerful means more expensive (unless you go with EDRAM, data move engines and KINECT apparently) and if the past correctly showed that power didn't matter that much in platform choice, there is a risk that the increased power and thus higher price would work against the platform, the competitor will gain more market share due to lower price or earlier to market and as a result the extra power will never be used to the fullest.

You could say power is a double edged sword.

 

[Jay]

Out of curiosity, what would Scorpio winning look like to you?
Selling more than x1, ps4, 4pro?
Just selling more than 4pro?

I get the feeling people have different ideas and expectations for Scorpio.

 

[iroboto]

I don't know who came up with this (I believe Xbox fans and media at the time(s) ), but

That probably doesn't count if the preferred platform is the strongest right?

Anyway, I figured nobody want to get too far ahead of the other team as more powerful means more expensive (unless you go with EDRAM, data move engines and KINECT apparently) and if the past correctly showed that power didn't matter that much in platform choice, there is a risk that the increased power and thus higher price would work against the platform, the competitor will gain more market share due to lower price or earlier to market and as a result the extra power will never be used to the fullest.

You could say power is a double edged sword.

In the past, the strongest platform did not win, that's more or less where it came from. (looking at OG Xbox, and Jaguar, NeoGeo, etc)
It just so happens this time around the strongest platform is also the preferred platform.

 

[turkey]

I don't know who came up with this (I believe Xbox fans and media at the time(s) ), but

That probably doesn't count if the preferred platform is the strongest right?

Anyway, I figured nobody want to get too far ahead of the other team as more powerful means more expensive (unless you go with EDRAM, data move engines and KINECT apparently) and if the past correctly showed that power didn't matter that much in platform choice, there is a risk that the increased power and thus higher price would work against the platform, the competitor will gain more market share due to lower price or earlier to market and as a result the extra power will never be used to the fullest.

You could say power is a double edged sword.

One probably only has to look at historical arcade for comparison's, Sega's arcade hardware was becoming increasingly exotic as well as powerful and thus expensive. Perhaps they pushed too hard on that front. Certainly now it's almost all PC hardware from what I can tell.

That said I think everyone probably remembers the first time they saw each of the "model" hardware running the flagship games, truly amazing.

 

[rokkerkory]

Out of curiosity, what would Scorpio winning look like to you?
Selling more than x1, ps4, 4pro?
Just selling more than 4pro?

I get the feeling people have different ideas and expectations for Scorpio.

We'll prob never get unit sales numbers again from MS. But gut feeling, if it sells a few million a year that would be good enough. S will still be where vast majority of the sales are.

 

[ProspectorPete]

With PS4 having a +30.000.000 unit sale lead we will probably never hear anything other than MAU from MS again.. Having said that, if Xbox Scorpio outsells PS4, then MS will probably announce it like that time in 2016 when Xbox had a higher monthly sale.

Xbox Scorpio outselling PlayStation, if only for a month, will be a 'win' in my view. It will also be a win if it outsells the Pro, or the Xbox One S.

If Sony Launches PS5 Q4 2018 though... The generations will become decoupled and the console 'war' over, forever. That's just my 2 cents or rather, my 750 euros (my PS investment a few weeks ago)

 

[Megadrive1988]

I fully expect another Xbox beyond Scorpio in either 2020 or 2021, the equivalent of PS5 (perhaps more powerful if not at least equal).

 

[-tkf-]

With PS4 having a +30.000.000 unit sale lead we will probably never hear anything other than MAU from MS again.. Having said that, if Xbox Scorpio outsells PS4, then MS will probably announce it like that time in 2016 when Xbox had a higher monthly sale.

Xbox Scorpio outselling PlayStation, if only for a month, will be a 'win' in my view. It will also be a win if it outsells the Pro, or the Xbox One S.

If Sony Launches PS5 Q4 2018 though... The generations will become decoupled and the console 'war' over, forever. That's just my 2 cents or rather, my 750 euros (my PS investment a few weeks ago)

Microsoft decides for themselves if they want a win.. just a matter of price really. But i think it's very obvious that Sony with the Pro made the perfect console to combat that. It will be very easy for Sony to lower the price and be able to sell the best bang for the buck console in a world where 4K is as rare as 60fps

 

[mosen]

Out of curiosity, what would Scorpio winning look like to you?
Selling more than x1, ps4, 4pro?
Just selling more than 4pro?

I get the feeling people have different ideas and expectations for Scorpio.

Scorpio must be a future proofed console (or in other word it should be considered as a next gen console for a 4yr period) with the ability to run PS5 and next Xbox games at lower setting, and it also should sell at least 20-25 million by 2019-2020 to be successful in my eyes.

 

[Rangers]

"the strongest platform never wins!"

PS4 much?

And there are always many factors. But Wii beating 360/PS3 for example (even then, dying incredibly fast) is not the "core" market.

Did Super Nintendo win that gen? I'd argue it was more "powerful" on balance than Genesis/TG-16 as well.

Edits: According to Wiki SNES sold 49 million vs Sega Genesis 31 million.

I remember Japanese shunned Genesis/Mega Drive because Sega had American roots or something, back then Japan sales were a much bigger piece of the pie.

 

[Rangers]

Scorpio must be a future proofed console (or in other word it should be considered as a next gen console for a 4yr period) with the ability to run PS5 and next Xbox games at lower setting, and it also should sell at least 20-25 million by 2019-2020 to be successful in my eyes.

From what we know of PS4 Pro sales this seems completely unreasonable.

I'd hold Scorpio to a higher standard as well, though.

Price is going to be incredibly key of course.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Xbox Scorpio outselling PlayStation, if only for a month

Isn't that to be expected at launch of a new system?