The Console Arms Race: Is This What Console Gamers Want?

[Sigfried1977]

There'll always be games which run like crap of course, but so far this generation has been really solid in this regard. Certainly much more so than the last. Unless you consider 1080p/30fps (i.e. how the machine was advertised) sub-par of course. But then, why the hell did you buy it in the first place?

 

[metacore]

I would say "arms race" and refreshed consoles every 3-4 years is only way going forward whether we like it or not. Simply from perspective of slowing die shrinks , which will prevent traditional " generation" shift, even after 6-7 years 8-16 x @ 100-200w performance is real tall order to put it mildly. Add to that more and more pervasive pixel /frame counting and expectations of quadrupling resolution in times of slowest gpu gains ... ever. Building 100mln$ software with small userbase is another matter.

On last page people are speculating about similar solution to "tick tock" consoles from my old thread

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/hypothetical-tick-tock-console-technology-business-model.56111/


It can be good thing if implemented sensibly from diffrences in specs beetween the models to TRCs. In Mark Cerny we trust, I guess.

 

[Egmon83]

PSP doubled the system ram.
out of the 4 available models, the last 3 all had 64MB instead of the 32MB from the first model.
In the end, not a single game took advantage of this, aside from a bigger UMD cache; gameplay was identical on all systems.

I think PS4K video edition will be exactly like that: with 4K blu ray playback and expanded color support as a requirement, the expanded colours could extend to gameplay. Even if the APU has the option for faster GPU clocks, or all 20 compute units enabled; I really don't think they will be used aside from being needed for the expanded colours (don't ask my why they would be needed); I just want to emphasise that the possible higher specs would not even be used for better anisotropic filtering, or higher res shadows, or other stuff during gameplay.
Just like how the newer PSP's had options for Skype, wide color gamut, video output, and so on. Games were 1:1 identical.

The PS4K would simply replace the PS4, just like the PSP 2000 and later models, with better hardware specs and more hardware features, replaced the earlier PSP 1000 model

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PSP doubled the system ram.
out of the 4 available models, the last 3 all had 64MB instead of the 32MB from the first model.
In the end, not a single game took advantage of this, aside from a bigger UMD cache; gameplay was identical on all systems.

AFAIK they weren't allowed to. It was only there for system and web browsing.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Well, each day so far this week there's been another article from another gaming source (I think I might have even seen one from Forbes) that is telling everybody distinctly not to buy a XB1 or a PS4 because they will be obsolete in a few months time because of statements from both MS and Sony about "expansion" or "PS4.5".

The issue becomes that if, as Shifty said, this will be a choice between a low-end model and a newer, more capable and more expensive one then when does that price adjustment occur?

The XB1 is currently $300, the PS4 is currently $350. In order to appease the fears and frustrations of many in this thread, you have to be very careful with timing and positioning of these new units or it will end up exactly like buying an iPad 3 as was stated earlier. I'm still going to be pissed if I buy an XB1 today and at E3 they launch XB4K. What are their options? Launch the XB4K at $300 but cut the XB1 to $250? I'm pissed, I just either spent $50 too much or could have gotten a better console for the same price. What if they launch the XB4K at $350 but keep the XB1 at $300? I'm also pissed, maybe I would have spent $50 more for the superior product.

Unless they are going to attempt to reset the price structure by making these new "refreshes" essentially launch-window pricing, I think people are going to end up being rather pissed. Sure, I buy a XB1 now for $300 and at E3 they launch an XB4K for $600, I'm probably okay with it. But it seems to me there had better be a huge price gap between the current and the new system and it also seems to me that its unlikely that degree of improvement would warrant that big enough of a gap. Just going to have a lot of people pissed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What are their options? Launch the XB4K at $300 but cut the XB1 to $250? I'm pissed, I just either spent $50 too much or could have gotten a better console for the same price. What if they launch the XB4K at $350 but keep the XB1 at $300? I'm also pissed, maybe I would have spent $50 more for the superior product.

Option 3) Don't give a shit. Have iPad sales plummeted because of iPad 3? No. You can't please everyone. It's not Sony's job to keep people happy, but to make money, so if pissing some people off makes more money than not then they'll piss people off. (Sub Sony for MS as required)

Getting 'burned' always happens. You never know when a price drop is coming, or a better product. If one can't live with that, one needs become a hermit free of the material world.

 

[Egmon83]

AFAIK they weren't allowed to. It was only there for system and web browsing.

maybe the PS4K will be the same?

Also Sony still has 3.5GB of ram as system reserved right?
They could upgrade all existing PS4's right there If you see what PS3/GTA5 could do with 200MB of usable ram, imagine what an extra 1GB could accomplice. Unless they still plan on running a few extra OSes or something, and they need the full 3.5GB in 2017

 

[function]

If you see what PS3/GTA5 could do with 200MB of usable ram...

Closer to 500 MB, not 200. And that was also streaming from two independent sources (optical and HDD) so may have been in a better situation for throughput than today's HDD only consoles. Also helped to have the largest development budget ever, and probably the most accomplished developer in the world making it. And PS3 was the lead platform too. GTA5 really had all the ducks lined up in its favour.

I played it on 360, with the "install" disk installed to external SSD (so very low latency), and the "play" disk also installed, to internal HDD. Streaming performance was amazing, and far in advance of anything PS4Bone could hope to get from their single, slow, laptop HDD.

This is to make two points:
1) One of the most important parts of the "arms race" - streaming performance - is awful and isn't going to change
2) If Sony or MS free up more ram, it'll be used for caching.

 

[eastmen]

Would people buy a 499 euro 2.8 teraflop Xbox One.Five over a 249 euro PS4?
If development targets the baseline PS4 anyway?

Maybe one of them could use the advancements in chip development to create smaller, more power efficient, but most of all cheaper consoles? (for example a PS4 with a 12nm APU and single 64 gigabit GDDR5 chip if such a thing ever existed)
100 million Wii tells us that there is a market for people who would put price and content before competing consoles which were 5-10 times more powerful.

A cheap(er) PS4 with compelling exclusive content, interesting alternative way to play games (VR), great 3rd party support, with a +50 million user base to back it up might compete very favourably against a mid generation Xbox One spec update/refresh.

Microsoft is possibly trying to allow multi-platform multiplayer to negate the delta in active users on competitors. If you can play the new COD against your PS4 friend with your Xbox anyway? you might as well get an Xbox 1.5 then. i mean Halo right?

I would think the jump is much bigger. 2016/2017 would give us Zen which will be leaps and bounds faster than jaguar . It will also give us Polaris/Vega . I would expect a 2016 apu designed from the ground up with the same power envelopes and tdp of the ps4/xbox one would hit 5-6TF then of course you can add hbm2.

You'd be able to hit 30fps or so at 4k or take some type of half step like 1440p and scale it down for 1080p users or up for 4k users.

If VR takes off which it seems to be doing. Just use a thunderbolt 3 add on. You don't need the cpu so you'd be able to reduce the size of the apu by removing them or using apu's with failed cpu portions. Put it in a small enclosure and ship it with your vr headset. You suddenly get twice the power in your console and you don't have to sacrifice graphics on your vr games.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

So you think they're going to go back to launch window pricing with these incremental upgrades? So instead of waiting 8 years to spend another $400 on a console, they're going to ask and people are going to pay $400 for a new console after 4 years rather than buy the current version for $300?

You can't possibly believe that they would launch PS4.5 within $500 of the PS4. One would cannibalize the sales of the other.

 

[eastmen]

So you think they're going to go back to launch window pricing with these incremental upgrades? So instead of waiting 8 years to spend another $400 on a console, they're going to ask and people are going to pay $400 for a new console after 4 years rather than buy the current version for $300?

You can't possibly believe that they would launch PS4.5 within $500 of the PS4. One would cannibalize the sales of the other.

I don't agree. Plenty of consoles continued to sell after the new ones came out. The playstation had its last revision and continued to sell. The ps2 did so also .


But it would largely depend on what the upgrade is. Is the ps4 4k we are hearing about just a ps4 with the vr stuff added in and a die drop then I would see them being closer in price to each other or the ps4 to disappear completely.

If we get a real upgrade like I described in my post for say the xbox one then I don't see why they couldn't exist together. The xbox is already $300 with gears of war ultimate . So factor in a die drop $200 is a real possibility. Launch the new xbox at $400-$500 and both will exist just fine. Not everyone can afford $400-$500 .

 

[Scott_Arm]

So you think they're going to go back to launch window pricing with these incremental upgrades? So instead of waiting 8 years to spend another $400 on a console, they're going to ask and people are going to pay $400 for a new console after 4 years rather than buy the current version for $300?

You can't possibly believe that they would launch PS4.5 within $500 of the PS4. One would cannibalize the sales of the other.

That's exactly what they'd do. It's not a forced upgrade. When iPhone7 comes out plenty of people will still be buying the more affordable 6 models. I'd expect if there is a PS4.5 in 2017 it would be at least $200 more expensive than PS4.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Option 3) Don't give a shit. Have iPad sales plummeted because of iPad 3? No. You can't please everyone. It's not Sony's job to keep people happy, but to make money, so if pissing some people off makes more money than not then they'll piss people off. (Sub Sony for MS as required)

Getting 'burned' always happens. You never know when a price drop is coming, or a better product. If one can't live with that, one needs become a hermit free of the material world.

Sorry to disagree. The way I see it you now have a 36 million happy clients market, and in a couple months you may have a 36 million pissed clients market.
Even if not all become pissed because they can afford 70 euros games, 60 euros premium services to play online, and a 400 euros console every 3 years, dont giving a shit about that, others will be pissed because they are as entitled to have fun as the others, and made savings to buy the product they wanted, and now they will be playing games at 20 fps while others are playing them at 40. And the closed consoles they bought to last a couple of years are now upgradable as the PC always was.
Sony financial health is not good enough. Its not Apple or Microsoft. I'm not shure pissing off their most loyal fanbase would be good for them.
I have a tecnology webpage, and talk a lot about consoles technology. I have several readers that, like me, are avid gamers, owning all or almost all consoles on the market (current ans past)". And all of them are pissed about this because if this is true they cannot consider keeping all consoles up to date. The solution seems to be abandoning consoles and just keeping the PC, updating only one machine, specially now that Microsoft is feeding it with Xbox games.
As I said on an article when Microsoft considered upgrades on the Xbox One, the problem is not the loyal fans that will upgrade and look away. The problem are the loyal fans that will be pissed. Because where before you had all your clients happy, now you will have a huge lot that are pissed off. And these were happy and loyal before.
In other words, well succeded or not, a PS4.5 will shake the market in ways that are unpredictable. And Sony may shake, and we may see it happen right away because sales may drop due to the expected new release. On my website, I'm already recomending people to think about all this news before buying a PS4.

 

[turkey]

I played it on 360, with the "install" disk installed to external SSD (so very low latency), and the "play" disk also installed, to internal HDD. Streaming performance was amazing, and far in advance of anything PS4Bone could hope to get from their single, slow, laptop HDD.

This is to make two points:
1) One of the most important parts of the "arms race" - streaming performance - is awful and isn't going to change
2) If Sony or MS free up more ram, it'll be used for caching.

You can use external ssd over usb3 with xbox one, thats some serious streaming bandwidth, whilst not stock its probably more common than your 360 setup due to ssd costs now and usb3 allowing a ssd to shine. A game could implement second streaming source as well I suppose.

You can't possibly believe that they would launch PS4.5 within $500 of the PS4. One would cannibalize the sales of the other.

But if its all about game sales and the games are cross revision it matters little apart from buying Playstation?
You are then in their ecosystem buying the same games,

Sony might also have pressure from UHD division to deliver something to keep 4k momentum going as a key stakeholder in the UHD alliance and they have no hardware player so thats pure lost sales and brand perception potentially.

 

[Grall]

Getting 'burned' always happens. You never know when a price drop is coming, or a better product.

You're typing this to the guy who bought not just ONE, but TWO R9 390Xes just weeks before AMD majorly slashed prices on those cards... (Of course, one of those was a warranty replacement, so the price I actually paid for it was fairly minor. But I wouldn't have paid at all after the price slash. )

This is life. Better stuff always comes out eventually. We just have to deal with it.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

You're typing this to the guy who bought not just ONE, but TWO R9 390Xes just weeks before AMD majorly slashed prices on those cards... (Of course, one of those was a warranty replacement, so the price I actually paid for it was fairly minor. But I wouldn't have paid at all after the price slash. )

This is life. Better stuff always comes out eventually. We just have to deal with it.

You may have to deal with it... But it would be really stupid if you were happy with it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...and now they will be playing games at 20 fps while others are playing them at 40.

You're getting upset over a fear of something that may never happen. In all likelyhood will never happen. And, again, ultimately human emotions aren't the deal here. Emotions are intense and short lived and don't really impact people's long term decision making when acute. We've all said/heard "never again" when we've been burned, but then we mellow out with time. So yeah, people may well make some noise, say they'll "boycott Sony forever" etc., but it won't happen. When the new 3DS came out, did 3DS die as the world protested? Or did a load of 3DS fans buy the new model because it gave a better experience, and passed the old model on to siblings?

Very, very worst case, which is what some are talking about, is PS4.5 is notably more powerful than PS4 and becomes the development target, offers the ropey ~30 fps console experience and PS4 simply isn't good enough. This situation requires PS4.5 to be notably more powerful and be more popular than PS4. Even if impactfully more powerful, as long as its not more popular it won't be the lowest common denominator and be targeted. It's not going to happen within two years of 4.5's launch even if it were twice as powerful - PS4 (XB1) will be the target spec for the next few years as it's where the money is. Just like no-one's writing iPad Air 2 only games, and no-one with a few-month-old Galaxy S6 is thinking all their games are going to be hampered by devs targeting the new S7. S7 comes out, but devs target hardware years old because that has the install base and that's where the money is.

I'd say you're right to tell your website visitors to think about this, but also to not be paranoid or unreasonable. We're not talking a new console generation. It's a new, uncharted territory. There's little point thinking of it like a new consle generation. And the key point here that the worryworts are missing is that it's the software developers that'll decide what'll happen, and they're very predictable because thye are governed by the need to earn a living and aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating their customers!

 

[bunge]

The number of people who have a current gen machine and looking to buy a second for a second room and who would be more than happy to buy an upgraded machine as a new primary machine and relegate the original to a secondary room is probably high.

That's a long sentence, but I think it works.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You may have to deal with it... But it would be really stupid if you were happy with it.

Philosophical response which shouldn't be discussed here, but why shouldn't you be happy (or content) with it? Why accept/feel unhappiness over something so irrelevant? Some feelings require action, which is why we feel them, but others are just misplaced. Change one's perspective, feel comfortable with the way things are (in this case), and save yourself stress and live happier. Well, that's one line of reasoning. Something to consider.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You may have to deal with it... But it would be really stupid if you were happy with it.

I think you're overestimating the importance of people's emotions toward a consumer device in their life compared to important things like their education, their kids, their mortgage, their car, their health...

Grall's attitude is proportionate and healthy as you would expect from a balanced person. Most of us have been there and being angry isn't going to help and will make you feel worse. Lose-lose.