Xbox Series... M?

[Frenetic Pony]

Better graphics can still be a huge selling point. The issue is the zen2/rdna2 consoles weren't enough to make people get wowed. The unreal 5 engine demo and matrix demos wowed people but we are 4 years in and haven't really gotten a game that looks like that. Perhaps hellblade 2 will start to usher that in.

People on this forum care. 90% of the potential audience does not. They're gonna go play Stardew Valley, Hades 2 is one of the most wishlisted games on Steam, Hades 2 can run on an Iphone; and this years Iphone doubled up the "programmable side buttons" in configuration that's "definitely not shoulder buttons on a controller if you hold the phone sideways, but you know it could be".

Apple has a chance to just crush, and Android phones after once they catch on. They need to figure out how to make the screen itself give enough haptic feedback that you can tell when your finger is hovering over a button and when you press one, or how "far from center" you're holding a virtual joystick, and which direction "center" is. When they do your phone can play Hades and Tales of the Shire and Death Stranding, and why the hell would you (90% of the population) buy a console then when you already spent money on one you carry around with you anyway?

That's the future, right there. It'll be great for the video game industry, every last person with a newer phone will be a potential customer, game sales could skyrocket. But for now mobile consoles have the potential.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Really I can see consoles surviving because they can be plugged in and provide a giant screen experience, but I'd say they need to offer a mobile experience as well. A dual model "Switch/Lite" could work.

Series M Lite could have 20CUs/64bit 16gb/1.9ghz/8 core Zen 6C/XDNA3 and a 15w tdp, and not have a video out.

The Series M normal, or super, whatever, could have 40CU/128bit 18gb/8 Core Zen 6/XDNA 3, all that extra chip could be cooled by a tiny solid state cooling system (40w is already possible) and activated when plugged in. 40CU 2.5ghz would be enough to be better than a Series X, now with much better raytracing and an entire NPU for ML upscaling/denoising. And customers still get a mobile console whenever they want it as well.

 

[eastmen]

People on this forum care. 90% of the potential audience does not. They're gonna go play Stardew Valley, Hades 2 is one of the most wishlisted games on Steam, Hades 2 can run on an Iphone; and this years Iphone doubled up the "programmable side buttons" in configuration that's "definitely not shoulder buttons on a controller if you hold the phone sideways, but you know it could be".

Apple has a chance to just crush, and Android phones after once they catch on. They need to figure out how to make the screen itself give enough haptic feedback that you can tell when your finger is hovering over a button and when you press one, or how "far from center" you're holding a virtual joystick, and which direction "center" is. When they do your phone can play Hades and Tales of the Shire and Death Stranding, and why the hell would you (90% of the population) buy a console then when you already spent money on one you carry around with you anyway?

That's the future, right there. It'll be great for the video game industry, every last person with a newer phone will be a potential customer, game sales could skyrocket. But for now mobile consoles have the potential.

I think we can argue about how big the base is for people who want the best graphics but they also buy a lot of games which makes them an important group to get.

Not sure what apple is going to crush people seem to say this every couple of years with apple and iphones and then nothing ever happens. hell we can go all the way back to the mac pcs with marathon and how apple would crush windows pc for gaming. it never happens because there is no real investment there.

Most people don't want to play a game on a tiny screen nor do they want to kill their primary device faster.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Agreed. It's a lot more complicated than people often think.

The main reason the M is viable is because of the S. The games already exist for a future M, because of the S.

 

[Cyan]

The world is moving on from needing better graphics as a major selling point. Back in 2007 Crysis was amazing because you could tell "those are palm trees, that's a tropical ocean, oh wow I can identify stuff!" while Modern Warfare 4 (the same year) had "this grey/brown box is house shaped". Now we're well beyond that, the "amaze" just isn't there.

that's so very true. Sure many games look impressive, but when I played Resident Evil 2 Remake 5 years ago, sometimes -especially the models- it looked very close to real life to me. Even my best friend told me, when Claire opens the door of the gas station at the very beginning "wow, look at her, even the eyes look real".

There are some impressive UE5 and Unity trailers and so on, but the best thing about power and technology was the fact that the extra power was at the service of the gameplay, with better and stable framerates and extra clarity.

The other day I watched a video of a retro arcade game, Thunder Blade, from 1987, and Super Thunder Blade, a version made for the Megadrive.

The arcade version had some extra hardware to run the game and the gameplay is a lot smoother, a guy completed it with 1CC 'cos the gameplay is excellent, the game looks crisp too.

However, the Megadrive version, even being a more modern hardware back in the day, doesn't have the hardware to run the game smootly, nor the graphics look as crisp, and the guy couldn't complete the game.

All the extra bells and whistles are okay but there is more than that, the art style, and the gameplay..., other than shiny graphics.

 

[Cyan]

MS has signed a 15 billion deal with Intel, due to their artificial intelligence developments. In the same month, they announced that they were making the next Xbox hardware, which would be the biggest leap in performance yet. I think there might be some connection between the two things here.

the future of the Xbox is quite intriguing and interesting. They could go with the initial idea of Xbox 1, which I purchased in 2005, my first console, 'cos it was like a PC, it had a hard drive and a Pentium III with a nVidia GPU.

What I don't see if them returning to a traditional console model, where the big players are Nintendo and Sony.

I'd love it if they go with Intel, but they could also go with Arm, or AMD and nVidia.

They could also try to mimick the japanese creators of the MSX computer, which used japanese hardware which had an OS made by Microsoft. It was a success.

This means they could go totally open, as long as the device is backwards compatible with the Series S as @cheapchips and @Johnny Awesome commented.

By that I mean they could create the software for an open PC to run like a console UI wise, with an environment for those who don't want to tinker -a la Steam Deck-, and create Xboy Certified guidelines, letting Asus, Lenovo, MSi, etc, build the hardware.

Microsoft would have a troy horse running everything, under Windows and DirectX, a horse that would benefit Microsoft a lot.

They could tell the hardware manufacturers, that games will run perfectly if the hardware has a certain amount of CPU cores/threads/speed, a GPU with a certain number of cores for rasterization plus RT support (with X amount of RT processing units), and an NPU of at least X TOPS, they could give Xboy Certified to those PCs because they know that those games would work just as well as on a traditional console in terms of Optimization.

That's to say a guaranteed 60fps, and so on, and people would play and forget like on a console, and this would be a major differentiator and advantage over Steam.

They could lock the device to only xbox/pc gamepass games along with maybe Epic Store games.

Also another option is that opening the "console" to a more typical PC mode may have an additional cost.

For example, the console could be worth $500 in Xbox mode (subsidized like the traditional console model, since the company then recovers money from the sales of games on its system and from pay-to-play online and other services).

And if you want to unlock it for PC Xboy mode, you have to pay an extra fee of, for example, 100 or 200 dollars (the console is no longer subsidized), but it becomes a PC with everything that means, cheaper games, that's it. no paying for online, many more games, retro, mods, productivity, design, programming, etc.

That should be done at the software level, where hardware manufacturers should only take care of the hardware to meet the Xboy requirements.

 

[QPlayer]

the future of the Xbox is quite intriguing and interesting. They could go with the initial idea of Xbox 1, which I purchased in 2005, my first console, 'cos it was like a PC, it had a hard drive and a Pentium III with a nVidia GPU.

What I don't see if them returning to a traditional console model, where the big players are Nintendo and Sony.

I'd love it if they go with Intel, but they could also go with Arm, or AMD and nVidia.

They could also try to mimick the japanese creators of the MSX computer, which used japanese hardware which had an OS made by Microsoft. It was a success.

This means they could go totally open, as long as the device is backwards compatible with the Series S as @cheapchips and @Johnny Awesome commented.

By that I mean they could create the software for an open PC to run like a console UI wise, with an environment for those who don't want to tinker -a la Steam Deck-, and create Xboy Certified guidelines, letting Asus, Lenovo, MSi, etc, build the hardware.

Microsoft would have a troy horse running everything, under Windows and DirectX, a horse what would benefit Microsoft a lot.

They could tell the hardware manufacturers, that games will run perfectly if the hardware has a certain amount of CPU cores/threads/speed, a GPU wa certain number of cores for rasterization plus RT support (with X amount of RT processing units), and an NPU of at least X TOPS, they could give Xboy Certified to those PCs because they know that those games would work just as well as on a traditional console in terms of Optimization.

That's to say a guaranteed 60fps, and so on, and people would play and forget like on a console, and this would be a major differentiator and advantage over Steam.

They could lock the device to only xbox/pc gamepass games along with maybe Epic Store games.

Also another option is that opening the "console" to a more typical PC mode may have an additional cost.

For example, the console could be worth $500 in Xbox mode (subsidized like the traditional console model, since the company then recovers money from the sales of games on its system and from pay-to-play online and other services).

And if you want to unlock it for PC Xboy mode, you have to pay an extra fee of, for example, 100 or 200 dollars (the console is no longer subsidized), but it becomes a PC with everything that means, cheaper games, that's it. no paying for online, many more games, retro, mods, productivity, design, programming, etc.

That should be done at the software level, where hardware manufacturers should only take care of the hardware to meet the Xboy requirements.

I see you have wild ideas too

 

[Frenetic Pony]

I think we can argue about how big the base is for people who want the best graphics but they also buy a lot of games which makes them an important group to get.

Not sure what apple is going to crush people seem to say this every couple of years with apple and iphones and then nothing ever happens. hell we can go all the way back to the mac pcs with marathon and how apple would crush windows pc for gaming. it never happens because there is no real investment there.

Most people don't want to play a game on a tiny screen nor do they want to kill their primary device faster.

The only difference between a decent smartphone and a mobile console is that the mobile console has a controller attached, while the smartphone is what is in everyone's pocket already. If you can add enough of a controller to the smartphone, then everyone has a mobile console in their pocket.

The tech for that is interesting, ultrasonic vibrations of the screen have been successful in getting 70% of people to think they've "pressed a button" so far, percentage might've improved since. The feedback needed for a virtual joystick or similar is also, possible, anyway. A variable "stickiness" can be programmed in that say, goes up as someone moves a joystick a way from center. But what would be needed is a way to deliver the sensation that the joystick is "pulling back" on the thumb towards the center, so the user constantly knows which direction they are pointing the joystick without having to see it at all.

And the majority of game sales come from people that buy maybe one or two a year, while the "core" crowd might buy several times that many or more, they're outnumbered more than 10 to 1 by the more casual crowd. No one that bought a Switch particularly cares about graphics, but it sold 140 million consoles, more than the PS5 and Series will achieve together.

Microsoft needs that market, they need that 140 million people that bought a Switch to be interested in them. The entire video game industry needs that market. The triple A developers have lost touch with reality and are throwing ever more tens of millions at each individual project to absolutely no benefit. I.E. In 1 console generation 3 Mass Effect games came out, and more people bought it each and every time. Since then "the cost of making AAA games has gone up!" only because the publishers/developers have made themselves believe as such, in part because that "core" crowd is loud. But they don't matter much, there's not enough of them to matter much. The games industry needs to get back to making sub $100 million projects that actually come out on a regular basis to get back to growth, not this "6 years and $150 million for each project" bullshit they've been huffing, that's not sustainable and the games industry being flat while PS5/Series console sales taper off just 4 years in helps prove it.

 

[arandomguy]

I know this is controversial but the graphics/tech crowd may eventually have to come to terms that they need to pay more on the software side and not just the hardware side if they want to be catered to. The incentive structure simply doesn't make sense when this supposed "deep pocketed" but more niche audience is willing to spend more money towards the hardware vendors but not the software vendors while expecting the software vendors to spend more to cater to them.

 

[eastmen]

The only difference between a decent smartphone and a mobile console is that the mobile console has a controller attached, while the smartphone is what is in everyone's pocket already. If you can add enough of a controller to the smartphone, then everyone has a mobile console in their pocket.

Well screen size , physical buttons , and active cooling. All of those are pretty important.

Also if you are out traveling you don't always have access to a wall socket. So an iphone playing a game or an hour or two and then not having a phone is a lot less attractive than having a second device that has its own battery life of a few hours and my phone can continue being used.

The tech for that is interesting, ultrasonic vibrations of the screen have been successful in getting 70% of people to think they've "pressed a button" so far, percentage might've improved since. The feedback needed for a virtual joystick or similar is also, possible, anyway. A variable "stickiness" can be programmed in that say, goes up as someone moves a joystick a way from center. But what would be needed is a way to deliver the sensation that the joystick is "pulling back" on the thumb towards the center, so the user constantly knows which direction they are pointing the joystick without having to see it at all.

virtual joysticks suck because your fingers wander across the screen at least in my experience.

And the majority of game sales come from people that buy maybe one or two a year, while the "core" crowd might buy several times that many or more, they're outnumbered more than 10 to 1 by the more casual crowd. No one that bought a Switch particularly cares about graphics, but it sold 140 million consoles, more than the PS5 and Series will achieve together.

The switch largely sells to a hardcore base of nintendo fans and to younger children. Both groups buy a lot of games vs the more casual groups that buy a switch and maybe mario kart or animal crossing.

Microsoft needs that market, they need that 140 million people that bought a Switch to be interested in them. The entire video game industry needs that market. The triple A developers have lost touch with reality and are throwing ever more tens of millions at each individual project to absolutely no benefit. I.E. In 1 console generation 3 Mass Effect games came out, and more people bought it each and every time. Since then "the cost of making AAA games has gone up!" only because the publishers/developers have made themselves believe as such, in part because that "core" crowd is loud. But they don't matter much, there's not enough of them to matter much. The games industry needs to get back to making sub $100 million projects that actually come out on a regular basis to get back to growth, not this "6 years and $150 million for each project" bullshit they've been huffing, that's not sustainable and the games industry being flat while PS5/Series console sales taper off just 4 years in helps prove it.

the problem with nintendo's market is its fickle. They showed up for the nes and super nes but largely skipped out on the n64 and gamecube , then they showed up with the wii but again completely ditched the wii u and then showed up again for the switch.

I think if you look at microsoft's game stack they offer a wide range of experiences from small to big games. I highly doubt avowed had a budget the size of starfield and it looks like its a 4 year dev cycle.


What do you think of Zelda ? Breath of the wild was march 2017 and Tears of the kingdom was May 2023. So that game was 6 years in development and used the same exact engine as breath of the wild with graphics that were on par with that game. So what took them so long and how much do you think it cost them being in development for 6 years ?

 

[Cyan]

mobile phones exist since eons ago. They didn't explode as gaming devices 'cos they aren't just meant for that. Gamepads for mobile phones also exist since many years ago, but they are devices for calling people, social stuff and battery life and portability are more important.

My best experience ever when gaming on a phone was playing F-Zero Maximum Velocity on my Lumia using an emulator and the virtual controls were okay but some games are impossible to play -in fact I had to hack the controls so I dragged the shoulder buttons over the left and right direction so every time I turned the ship, it would tilt, it was playable and I even finished the game, but never again....

Still, playing on a mobile phone feels like playing on a full-fledged Windows with lots of programs running in the background without optimisation. They are just computers now.....

You can make a lot of money on games for mobile phones though, 'cos the entire humanity has a mobile phone nowadays.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

mobile phones exist since eons ago. They didn't explode as gaming devices 'cos they aren't just meant for that.

They totally did! Mobile gaming is bigger than all other gaming.

 

[arandomguy]

I think we're running into somewhat semantics issue here and that the term gaming isn't as narrow of a descriptive anymore compared to when the hobby was more homogenous.

Imagine if we just grouped watching films in theatres, films at home, tv at home, streaming services, sports, youtube, tik tok, etc. all under one term as "videoing" or something.

Gaming is going to have more distinctive sub groups these days. Whether that be SP gamers, esports gamers, sports gamers, casual/puzzle, social, etc. Some of those groups might have very low crossover with others.

 

[eastmen]

I think we're running into somewhat semantics issue here and that the term gaming isn't as narrow of a descriptive anymore compared to when the hobby was more homogenous.

Imagine if we just grouped watching films in theatres, films at home, tv at home, streaming services, sports, youtube, tik tok, etc. all under one term as "videoing" or something.

Gaming is going to have more distinctive sub groups these days. Whether that be SP gamers, esports gamers, sports gamers, casual/puzzle, social, etc. Some of those groups might have very low crossover with others.

Yea I agree. my mother plays candy crush on her phone. She was never in the market for a video game system and never will be. Before candy crush on her phone she had a small handheld that had poker on it and that was all it could play and before that she just read and watched tv.

I think here in this forum when we talk about gaming we are talking about people playing gears of war or uncharted not candy crush.

The people playing games on phones are playing very shallow game play variants and the majority of people do it when killing time between doing something else. Once you try and natively run the popular games from consoles on cell phones the draw backs become very apparent

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think we're running into somewhat semantics issue here and that the term gaming isn't as narrow of a descriptive anymore compared to when the hobby was more homogenous.

Imagine if we just grouped watching films in theatres, films at home, tv at home, streaming services, sports, youtube, tik tok, etc. all under one term as "videoing" or something.

Gaming is going to have more distinctive sub groups these days. Whether that be SP gamers, esports gamers, sports gamers, casual/puzzle, social, etc. Some of those groups might have very low crossover with others.

Fair, but then people need to start using more terms than just 'gamer/gaming' if talking about various subsets.