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

[Grall]

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

Happy? Well, considering I thought the card was worth the price before the price drop I'm not really UNhappy about it, so let's say I'm neutral. A realist. You kind of have to be in a universe where statistically a dropped sandwich will land butter-side down... If you walk around and be dissatisfied about all these things, you'll end up miserable all the time.

That said, the R9 390 series is quite a bargain now for the performance it brings. If you want high-end gaming (or compute) performance for a somewhat reasonable sum, you really could do worse than this...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The Poll question has been changed for clarity, from "shorter console cycles" to "half cycle upgrades". If your position is different in this case to that you voted, please ammend your vote. Otherwise there's a fault in the data when referenced in other discussion.

 

[BRiT]

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.

Please stop talking about the entire market when you haven't spoken to the entire market to know how they'd feel. There are a few rational users who wouldnt be pissed because what they bought will continue to work perfectly fine with current released games until the system dies, and with new games for another 3 to 4 years or so until the NextNext console upgrade hits.

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.

No, thats not how it was proposed to work. They would merely have lower resolution not lower fps.

 

[Egmon83]

I remember KZ:SF having excellent 'upscale tricks'/reconstruction But it was not really efficient right? If they could use something like that for the old PS4; so about the same image quality; but reduced motion resolution, versus PS4Plus having the full1080 motion resolution or something.

 

[liolio]

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 recommending people to think about all this news before buying a PS4.

Outcome is indeed unpredictable, though I see some benefits mid long term for Sony. If Sony releases a PS4K, they are cornering Microsoft badly. If MSFT releases a better XB1, it will face the PS4 greater market share but if Sony is already here I see no room for MSFT aka the release of a new system is unlikely to change the trend which favors Sony.

Now for the greater topic here, I'm really surprised that the topic is seriously consider, it was may be making sense till a couple year ago but now it is the worth time to consider it, I mean cpu news are uninteresting, so are GPu news ( I feel like it has been forever since the real big new thing...and somehow it is...), even the mobile market start to underdeliver when it comes to exitement, 14/16nm chips are cool but it is only an economical choice for high end, qnd in the face of lesser growth opportunity the low and mid end device are close to gettting worth than they were a couple year ago (/different trade off are made but there no improvemens made across the board).
I mean it might be tough to swallow for geeks (and i wait for the real mouth pice the market realization of the implications...) but why consider this now, denial? You don't really need that fast a refresh rate on the PC realm, why consider it on console?

 

[Sigfried1977]

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.

Actually, Sony's job is to make consumer electronics and hopefully please people by doing so. The money part comes later. The last time Sony ignored that simple business correlation, the "600 dollars" fiasco happened and meant that the company had to spend the better part of an entire generation paying dearly for their arrogance.

And just because something works for Apple doesn't mean it has to work for anyone else. Heck, it doesn't even work particularly well for most of Apple's competitors, and that includes Sony with its Xperia products.

 

[Egmon83]

There can never be a competitor to Apple when looking at profits: they have the largest volumes of parts; the cleanest, easiest designs with the least amount of screws, cables, packaging and so on.

Even if a company was able to built something better than this for example:

Which is unlikely, as demonstrated for the past 4 years (which is infinity in tech-time), they would not be able to get the same deals on the memory, batteries, displays, materials and so on.

Apple thus should not be used as a benchmark; instead look at the other companies which are basically fighting for scraps

 

[London Geezer]

It doesn't work well for most of Apple's competitors in markets where they compete with Apple.

Apple does not exist in the console market. How are they relevant?

 

[Sigfried1977]

And why would it work in a market that spent decades conditioning the audience to expect longevity from their purchases? A market littered with nothing but failed mid-generation upgrade experiments no less.

 

[London Geezer]

Remember, they were mid gen experiments that segmented the markets (motion controllers and Kinect would only work with games designed for them).

This mid season finale would work wonders if it doesn't divide the market. I think. I'm not sure.

 

[function]

Feel like we're going round in circles a little here, but who's suggesting there shouldn't be longevity from console purchases? PS4K or XBone.2 aren't speculated to be 32X style slot in add-ons.

Short(er) cycles with forwards compatibility isn't something that's been tried before, so no littering going on here. Just look after your customers through this (and every) transition. Like Apple (mostly) does, or like MS (mostly) does for their core OS market.

It doesn't work well for most of Apple's competitors in markets where they compete with Apple.

Apple does not exist in the console market. How are they relevant?

Sony and MS can both make amazing products.

The issue Sony and MS have is with being (or being perceived as being) so good to the customer that loyalty and price premiums are well worth it. Forwards and backwards compatibility, and an unbroken ability to play games with users on newer / older systems, digital library continuity, customer service etc are all things they can deliver if they chose to.

Sony did a really good job of looking after core PS3 owners even when they were hurting from the terrible choices they made going in to last generation. I think maybe they've earned a little bit of the loyalty and reputation they've had going in to the start of this generation.

MS still have some way to go - at a high level they sometimes have a strange mixture of indifference bordering on contempt for their consumer/hardware customers, even though their hardware guys (Zune, phones, surface, 360S and X1) are first rate and love giving people great products.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

And why would it work in a market that spent decades conditioning the audience to expect longevity from their purchases? A market littered with nothing but failed mid-generation upgrade experiments no less.

There is no reason that existing base PS4 consoles wouldn't continue to be supported for as long they would have, were Sony not to introduce a boosted console mid-generation. Sony have control over this with the TRCs but regardless or what Sony may mandate, developers will target the largest user base because that's where the captical spend is - those 50 million PS4/Xbox One owners.

For what it's worth I don't see a PS4K (4K disc, 4K streaming, more powerful gaming hardware) being more than a niche segment of any future PS4 market for as long as Sony produce a cheaper PS4 and mandate developers support it. While my preferred choice of gaming hardware has nothing to do with cost, I think it's likely that many game on a console because itis predictable performance on a predictable budget and I don't see this changing overnight.

 

[London Geezer]

I just don't see how gamers, passionate gamers who buy consoles and games for them, can complain of having to spend £350 every 3-4 years instead of 6, if Sony can guarantee they won't split the software library.

Casual gamers, by definition, should be able to afford anything, or else they wouldn't buy a PS4 for 'casual gaming' to begin with.

Current PS4 gamers will enjoy their PS4 until they buy a PS5, with the games that will be released until then which will work on PS4 and PS4K. If that is actually what's happening (disclaimer).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Actually, Sony's job is to make consumer electronics and hopefully please people by doing so.

No, the job is to make money. If they made awesome products and gave them away for a crazy low price, they'd die as an entity. If they made crap products and drove people mad with rage, but those people still kept giving Sony crazy amounts of money, they'd be a successful business.

The correlation, as you say, is required, but the choices need to favour making money over pleasing consumers. The only reason to please consumers in business terms is to make more money from them. Only charities and alturistic organisations may concern themselves with making people happy without a priority being on monetising that good will.

If releasing a PS4k makes less money because people are upset, it's a bad move. If it makes more money with or without people being upset, it's a good move.

 

[London Geezer]

Well. Sony job IS to make money, by making electronics (and a lot more) that - hopefully - please people. If they didn't please people, those people wouldn't keep buying their products in the long term, with obvious consequences.

 

[Egmon83]

A few things:
It's not like PC of course, but when I was still maintaining windows.. Defragmenting, updating, rolling back drivers, tweaking performance, rebooting, overclocking, undervolting and so on, I could have bought a new PC (instead of new parts). Because of new processor slots and memory speeds. All my games and programs would have worked still. But I chose to wait a few years, lowering resolution eventually to 1024*768 to still be able to max out F.E.A.R. at the time. (Then I switched to mac and never bought another pc part, except for memory modules and SSDs)

With that PC mindset, I could have upgraded at any point. Still, it didn't feel like my 'old' PC was worth less when newer parts were coming out. Because I knew.

With iPhone, you can buy the S model now, but you know that this year there will be a 7 model; which will have different exterior, better camera, screen, processor and so on. You choose to buy the 6S now, because you need a new phone. And you know it will be supported until 2020 anyway. People buy them every day though. Every 5 seconds a child starves in Africa. That aside, every single second at least 1 iPhone is sold, with +200 euro profit. Before the new model however, there is a slight dip of people not buying the current model and choosing to wait weeks/month until the new one comes out.

Now for consoles... they are long time investments at this moment. The platform holder ideally wants several years life cycles because it helps with developing software, lowering hardware costs, and maximising market share, as well as profit. Will a mid generation refresh, instead of the now standard slim revision (even lower costs, 'large' price cut possible even) generate profit? only time will tell.

Once console gamers view consoles as pre built, non- part upgradable pc's, all will be well. You will be angry that... Ubisoft? has shitty performance on 'older' hardware, but if old games get new hardware profiles (which should be super easy, they only have to test 1 new configuration). Some, or a lot of gamers could be really happy. Free HD remasters mid generation sounds nice right?

 

[London Geezer]

If it comes out, they said it will be 2017. Even Q1 would already be 3 and a half years since the launch of PS4! Who can't want a more powerful platform almost 4 years after the last console??

 

[AlNom]

At least 17 people.

 

[London Geezer]

Larger install base than WiiU.

 

[bunge]

The Atari 2600 was in production from 1977 to 1992.