PlayStation and Xbox: The Infinite Consoles
The biggest event on the video games industry’s calendar is imminent. The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) officially kicks off in Los Angeles on June 14th, where we’ll see dozens, if not hundreds, of new game announcements over the course of the week. High on the list of likely revelations is the prospect of tweaked and upgraded versions of both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. Hints of something coming have been circling for a while now.
Back in March, Kotaku broke the story that Sony is planning a new version of the PlayStation 4 that boasts beefier graphical capabilities (said to be AMD’s new Polaris chipset), presumably to provide the necessary horsepower for its future designs on virtual reality. This new box is now thought to be codenamed Neo and the odds are high that we’ll see it at the company’s pre-E3 media event on June 13, with a release probably alongside the PlayStation VR headset this October.
In April, Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning added fuel to the fire when he appeared on the The Game Informer Show with a revelation about a comment made to him by Sony president of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida. According to Lanning, while preparing for a presentation with Yoshida at a games industry event in February 2015, the subject of future iterations of PlayStation came up. “I said ‘well what does the PlayStation 5 look like?'” Lanning remarked, “and he said ‘you mean if.'”
In late May, Kotaku reported that Microsoft is also looking to beef up its Xbox One, and it has plans to release a more powerful version at some point in 2017. Based on rumored specifications, this upgrade, with the delightfully villainous codename Scorpio, should theoretically have enough juice to support the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. (The current Xbox One most certainly does not.) Like Sony, Microsoft has a big media event prior to E3 on June 13, and if Scorpio is really ready for primetime, we’ll no doubt see some acknowledgment of it then.
While neither of these new systems seem like they are intended to completely supplant existing hardware, they are more powerful (and presumably more expensive) versions that will sit alongside the consoles that are on store shelves today. They’ll run all the same games, they’ll just do so a bit better.
Given that both the PS4 and the Xbox One were only just released in 2013, and the life-expectancy of a successful game console is typically in the six to eight year range, you’d be forgiven for scratching your head and feeling a tiny bit annoyed that the expensive box you just bought is no longer the new hotness. Furthermore, you might wonder why these companies are thinking of fragmenting their audience just as these things are hitting their stride.
What’s really happening is that hardware is now basically just a commodity. Consoles no longer require the bespoke silicon that older generations did to deliver state-of-the-art games. Off-the-shelf chipsets mean the hardware is no longer loss-making at launch, but break-even (this used to take three years – another reason why a seven year console cycle was popular with Sony and Microsoft; they got to make money on hardware for a few years before junking it and starting over.) Both the PS4 and the Xbox One are fundamentally just task-specific PCs, albeit ones that are set up to serve closed, entertainment-focused ecosystems – the Xbox even runs Windows.
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