Post Xbox One Two Scorpio, what should Sony do next? *spawn* (oh, and Nintendo?)

It depends on what New PS4 actually is, if it has the DF's specs(which is the most likely scenario), there is no reason for it not to launch this Fall.

Exactly, hardly anyone want a reset any time soon. And when it happens, Scorpio will get skipped either way, whole market will just jump over it. MS should be fully aware of this, which is why Scorpio will probably have... Jaguar cores, say hello. It's like the only chance to fit Vega in an APU, if it's possible at all, and APU(looks like it) on their rendering looked to small even for Polaris10.

This is a damn good one!

 

Don't forget that BOM of PS4 is in fact lower than xbox one in 2013.Why can't Sony design a slim PS4 which has the same BOM as xbox Ones?

 

You discuss MS in the best scenario. Let's talk some more reasonable case.

First, if next xbox has 24GB RAM then it may cost 499 or more.

Second, in 2017 Halo and Gears may not have a new main installment due to short development period. However, Sony's GOW and GT may launch early.

Third, in the next 1 1/2 years Sony probably launches a slim PS4 to compete with xbox ones in the same range of price. PS4 slim and NEO can widen the gap to xbox one.

When next xbox launches in winter 2017, the gap between PS4 and xbox one may be widen to about 30~40 million. Even Neo can't compete but PS4 slim in the cheaper price can compensate for the sales.

 

So to clarify, just over a year after releasing a matured tech with 1.3TF @ $300-$400 dependant on HDD size you think they will release a brand new tech machine ~4x the power with 50% more memory at just $400?

 

In short, the Neo is not required, I see no reason why we can't just plod along with the PS4 and Xbox One for the next 2-3 years before looking into a successor. But it is coming, just like thre Scorpio and we have to look at whether it has a place or not.

I agree, it was obvious that it was missing from E3, but personally feel that Sony was only going to announce it as a mid-cycle refresh with a bit more power to boot. But then Microsoft dropped the Scorpio-bomb and Sony must have panicked. I feel that the Neo pre-E3 wasn't going to be pushed as the be-all-and-end-all, but a refresh and premium product. So probably didn't need all the glitz and glamour.

Well, what's way more? $100 more?

To be continued.....

 

...continued

Resolution isn't everything. You can still show the same game at the same resolution but have it looking better. Better textures, Better geometry, Better framerate, Better shadows, Better effects. Also, I am in no doubt that the Neo can do 4K. Don't get me wrong, it will struggle to do 4K natively for games, unless it reduces geometry and framerate etc, but I see no reason why it couldn't do 1440p and upscale to 4K or even downscale to 1080p.

Yes, in my opinion, the Neo is primarily to make the PSVR experience so much better. I am in no doubt that PSVR will look good with the PS4, but should look so much better with the NEO. Again, won't be down to framerate, but providing better geometry, draw-distance, textures and effects to make the difference between PS4 and Neo.

The problem for marketing is to make sure the PS4 is sold as a great experience while the Neo is sold as the best home console experience. Believe me, I see no reason why there won't be quite a big difference between PS4 and Neo versions. No doubt there will be big enough differences for Digital Foundry.

4K native console.... Scorpio will struggle to produce 4K native gaming with any extra visuals over the Xbox One version, and don't expect to see 4K@60fps on the Scorpio.

4K native....is that the buzz word of the month? We are nearly 3 years in this generation (PS4/XBox One) and we are just getting to the point where games are becoming 1080p native. We were promised 1080p FullHD native gaming when the PS3 came out yet very few games supported it....we are now 10 years down the line and just about getting there. 4K TV's in houses are not mainstream yet and won't be for at least another 2-3 years. Assuming the Neo is released in November this year, then I fully expect a backwards compatible PS5 to release in November 2019.

We won't know if the Neo is mistake until it's been on the market for 6-12 months. As I've said before, I reckon the games will look considerably different. Microsoft has just annouced the Xbox One S, which is a mid-cycle upgrade.....HDR, 4K BR....those are extras over the basic Xbox One...and when the Scorpio releases in 2017, means that Microsoft have released 3 consoles between 2013-2017?

The Neo is there to help sales of the PSVR IMHO. Personally I don't see an issue with it. Although ideally, it needs to be released this calendar year and be $399 at the most. The Neo will help prolong the life of the Playstation brand in its 4th iteration.

At the moment, PS4 sales are double that of the Xbox One, I expect One S's to sell well due to the 4K BR drive, but most people will wait until the cheaper $299 model is released, whenever that is. By then, I fully expect the Neo to be announced and release at $399 with the PS4 reducing in price to $299 to put the Xbox brand again. I still expect Playstation sales to be much higher WW than Xbox and we could see PS4/Neo combined sales of 70m+ by the time Scorpio releases on the frenzied. Xbox will probably be only around 30-35m at this point. And seeing as people are buying in each ecosystem with digital sales etc, it will be harder for consumers to move from PS to Xbox when Scorpio releases. This is my point. Sony are trying to tie up consumers early to the PS ecosystem and the Neo allows them to be the best, most powerful home console for a year until the Scorpio is released.

 

Exactly. I still believe that Microsoft is losing money with the XBox One S, especially the $299 version. I'm sure the 4K BR drive must push up the BOM cost considerably. Also like to said, if people honestly expect the Scorpio to release with a 4x the power with between 12-24GB of GDDR5 memory for $399, then unless MS wants to lose a crap-load of money, it will not happen.

 

Yep the pricing of the Slim it´s really stiff, but they are launching early with all of the new media capabilities and they have a truckload of Ones to sell in order to clear the channel.

In one of the interviews, an Ms exec (i don´t remember who) specifically talked about "traditional console prices" i didn´t get the impression that scorpio was going to be a really expensive machine, they are targeting Holidays 2017 for a reason

 

And people are complaining about Neo upsetting PS4 owners - imagine how upset folk will be when a $400 Scorpio hits. I'm not saying it'll be expensive by the way, I'm just saying more expensive than Neo (likely $500) as logic suggests anything under that will cost MS. And if slim price isn't 'stiff' then why not plug the gaping hole of sales today and stem the flow of migration to PS4?

 

The existing Xbox One Bluray drive is already faster than the 128Mbit/s required for UHD Bluray.

Cost increases can come from APU, RAM and storage (flash ?). MS has some catching up to do when it launches, so a subsidized sales price is plausible, IMHO.

$400 would be a good price for consumers

Cheers

 

If the CPU is also upgraded I think a $400 console would give me a tough choice over upgrading my PC...

 

The existing Xbox One drive is more expensive than PS4 drive. And regardless of speed it still cant read UHD triple layer discs, its only logical to assume its more expensive than the existing drive

As for Scorpio price, the only real information we have is from Phil Spencer saying it will be "premium price". There are a dozen other words he could have used if it was going to be "cheap"

affordable, competitive, high value for good price. Premium? Not so much. Nobody said the PS4 399 price was premium when it launched

 

Agreed, it’s an interesting time to discuss and advance the discussion. One of the difficulties I’ve been noticing in this particular topic is that there are 3 contexts that are often used interchangeably during discussion, but are separate matters: marketing, value to the customer, technical capability.

In my post, I tried to stay as close as possible to the marketing context, and so often the replies to my message if they went into ‘value’ or ‘technical’ I generally avoided responding as they weren’t incorrect or invaluable, but they weren’t discussing the same topic I was.

I agree though, Scorpio needs to be discussed as well, in this topic I tried to look at Neo in pure isolation, mainly because my state is that I assume customers buy into an ecosystem because of their games, and if it’s strictly due to power, then these individuals would flip flop regardless, and therefore it would be pointless to discuss them as their behaviour goes towards the power leader. So the question for me would quickly become about the larger Sony base and whether Neo was a good product for them.

Neo is worth the glitz and glamour, and I believe that they were in fact waiting for the games to showcase it’s power, however the challenge they face is that better looking titles are subjective and per title; it’s clear to all customers that not all titles would be equal in how much better they would appear on Neo. They probably noticed the challenge they were facing there when going up against ‘4K native’ which is both a specification and by default, objective.

As many have noted earlier, marketing is not difficult when the product can sell itself; technical checklists tend to be a strong form of marketing, as you either have it or don’t. Whether it’s a better product because more boxes are checked, well, you and I and many B3Ders know better than this. But that’s a separate topic than the messaging itself. The prominence of the internet helps inform users here much more than before, but topics such as draw distance, texture quality, AF, AA etc, AO, etc are topics that are probably well into enthusiast territory. These become more difficult to explain to the masses as to why it matters or whether they can even spot it.

This is an interesting point, I guess this lies in marketing. The price is supposed to dictate demand, and in my second response I posted a price/value matrix to indicate what I thought the market would do depending on both where price and perceived performance would land.

To summarize, if Neo is visibly and noticeably better than PS4 and a significantly cheaper price, that would draw everyone to buy a Neo. A success for sure. But everyone would have to turn over their PS4s. That would be a beginning of the end of the PS4 generation as everyone would migrate to the visually stunning Neo. I’m unsure if people would be happy with that, fairly certain good will would be lost with some customers. There are a variety of markets who make up their purchasing base, but at the top of my mind I would assume price sensitive customers and parents (who bought for their kids) would be pissed off by that, or anyone that just got into the platform.

If the graphics were to provide 2x the graphical power (full use of 4.xx TF at 1080p) then would it be incorrect to double the price compared to PS4? It is double the performance right? Would the market see this as unfair? I think not. If the price is 1.5x but performance is 2x, then you’re looking at a great deal for the buyer.

Looking at GPUs, they are priced in exactly such a way that TF seems to align very closely with price. Once again not sure what Sony’s play will be here on pricing.

I guess it really depends on how many units Sony wants to sell.

I’ve determined that it should fall between 449-699. Based on the above points.

I don’t disagree at all, if you read some of my ramblings up and about this forum I’m more interested in seeing 1080p with more stuff on than to see 4x more pixels. At a certain point in time resolution can only do so much, especially when we see things like really low resolution shadows for instance. But to someone who only understands say ‘Hi-Fi’ setups and is looking to maximize their 4K TV investment, I see their priorities as being different.

Right, once again on this note, I totally agree from a value perspective here, there are less difficulties marketing Neo as being the ultimate PSVR device. But they wedged themselves into a hard spot when they announced PSVR for PS4, released its spec and took pre-orders without letting people know Neo was coming. People bought in expecting to use their PS4 with this device.


... continued lol character limits

 

... continued

I touched on this aspect earlier, but with some of your post below I’ll continue on this conversation after the next part.

Right, and I purposefully didn’t want to get into Xbox just yet, just to separate the discussions perhaps some people took it as bias, but this was actually a strong indicator for me and what MS was trying to do with Scorpio. Your point is valid and it didn’t take long for everyone here to figure this part out. 4K native of a Xbox One game probably requires Scorpio. There’d be very little difference in look except texture quality (assume 4K textures) and resolution (4k).

Interestingly enough, this came off as bad messaging. Many journalists wrote about this and we have another thread based upon how Shifty and others thought that was bad messaging; when Spencer said if you have a 4K TV get Scorpio, otherwise get an XBO. And it wasn’t until a lot of pressure did he fuss up a generic response, it’s up to the developers to do what they want with the power. And the internet proceeded to crucify Spencer on this flip flop messaging,

And it would probably take some time to write out a good post about this, as it could be lengthy, but since we’re discussing it, here at my thoughts at the moment. (this is a technical context)

Scorpio is not a next gen device for MS. It is meant most certainly to attack the 4K market, and for the most part it will run settings very similar to XBO, so that the two run in parallel. It’s spec sheet and how it’s been marketed (originally) all align to this. They have a device prepared for the upcoming 4K shift in television sets. This actually comes off as boring. It would appear among gaming enthusiasts and developers; would rather see higher frame rates and more graphical options (Neo). But such is the cost of 4K resolution. 4x more pixels than 1080p.

When I look at Neo, if all that GPU is dedicated towards better graphics at 1080p then you’ve got an even larger issue with PS5. Mainly, to keep the offering of Neo but at 4K native resolution, you’d need 4.xxTF x 4 = a 17-18TF SOC. Would that be available in 2019? I’m not so sure as that’s a pretty big number. So definitely I feel that Neo is going to be spending some of it’s horsepower on resolution and downscale from there. And if PS5 was just a 4x a PS4, well then everyone would notice this massive drop off in quality, and that’s not great either.

Anyway, that’s actually what lead me to believe why we have a mid-gen upgrade. For MS they targeted 4K resolution, for Sony they targeted performance. Both of them will have a wait a long time afterwards to have a 4K next generation machine.

Marketing is marketing. I actually hold a similar stance to yourself, I don’t believe that 4K is a thing for X number of years as well. But it does appear as though I am wrong, 4Ks have come down significantly in price and the expectation go forward at least by 2017-2018 is that 4K is going to become the standard.

I don’t expect PS5 to come in 2019, just given my thoughts above.

I don’t consider a Slim a different console. By that margin, though if a PS4 slim (rumoured) is coming Sony would be sitting at 4 consoles in < 10 years (should PS5 arrive in 2019; unlikely). But I’ll concede this is a good counter-point. If Neo games are significantly better looking than PS4, with a low price point, I’m pretty sure PS4 will EOL, and actually trigger the next generation for Sony. They need to be really careful here as the backlash could be significant.

I only expect Scorpio games to look like XBO games, but in 4K native resolution. And XBO games for the most part look like PS4 games but with less resolution. If Neo is bringing an all new graphical grade in terms of fidelity that’s something else entirely. Which is actually a marketing problem not a technical or value one.

I’m generally not going to engage in the sales strategy discussion. I recognize that’s part of marketing, but it’s too blue ocean to really know how Sony or MS will respond with pricing.

I really just wanted to look at the products themselves and the messaging. I saw Scorpio as having a very straight forward message because it’s simply a check box, they can charge whatever they want here to match the Hi-Fi space. I think Sony will have a harder time marketing and pricing Neo. At $399 I don’t see any need for a slim nor do I see any need for a PS4.

 

There is a lot of time to get the price down/competitive for Scorpio assuming that is is launching next year holidays (which seems most likely at the moment).

I don't expect Microsoft to go beyond $499. If anything I expect them to hit $499 or maybe even $449 in the U.S. Ideally they could even get it to $400 which seems to be the sweetspot for a games console launch these days.

 

@iroboto, thanks for the responses. You've cleared a lot up for me.

I personally favour the route of 1080p with better framerates, cleaner/higher res textures, extras in general rather than trying to shoehorn a basic experience into a 4K resolution.

Although I still think a PS5 will release in late 2019 with a specification that will blow even the Scorpio out the water. With a mixture of a much better CPU as well as a much higher tFlop GPU, which should at that point be able to produce native 4K, but again, we may see just resolutions higher than 1080p upscaled to 4K.

One thing is for sure, it will be really interesting to see what Neo can do, I really hope it does release this year.

 

That may be the sweet spot for standard console launches, but these aren't standard consoles.

Consoles sell at $500, but to core gamers. So launch at the premium price, then bring it down to the standard console prices as soon as they can.

Due to shorter cycles they may need to reduce the price quicker though.
I'd be all for the $400 mark, just don't know how feasible it is though.

 

I think there's a big difference with ideal price points now, because they continue to support the lower cost model equally. It changes the model completely.

They both talked about it as a "high end version" of the PS4/XB1 so it wouldn't be surprising to see them around $499. A console launch that is a generation reset needs to sell extremely quickly to reach a critical mass, the entire industry depends on it, because it needs a user base to justify the game development cost. It's not the case with this mid-gen thing, it's more like a new high-end PC GPU coming out, while the low-end models still continue to be made as the most popular baseline power which games are targeting.

The problem of critical mass would probably be felt on how much effort developers will spend optimizing for that new target specs. If it sells very quickly it's the old SKU that might suffer, if it doesn't sell quickly it's the new SKU that won't be as good as it could be.

Also I wonder about the fixed expense of making new hardware, which is no longer amortized for an entire generation, they will sell half as much because it's always overlapping. Many hundreds of millions is a lot of money to amortize over only 3 years.

 

Very true. These consoles are for people who are willing to spend more for a better experience. For me, Microsoft's more ambitious specs are more appealing but there is literally nothing (in terms of market penetration prediction) to go on with regards to this new premium console market.

 

One caveat is that if this mid-gen model comes out too expensive (like the previously proposed 24GB to 32GB of GDDR5), it will not drop in price sufficiently to become a good low-end SKU in 3 or 4 years. Or it will have to be subsidized for it's entire existence.