| Azzanation said: Your missing one key fact. Starting a generation costs billions. It takes half a generation life span to make back the RnD costs. Starting a new gen will reset all the games. Why would MS want to reset all there games as they are adding more and more to there BC lineup (like Steam) If you cant see it by now, the Xbox eco system is becomming more like a Steam service where you can play all your games. I dont believe a X2 is in the works. I believe theres a boosted X1X in the making that will rival PS5 specs but will play all X1 games etc. Thats the trend i see MS going and its alot cheaper. PC has the largest gaming community where gamers have different spec PCs with a monster library of games. There is no need for generations anymore. It does nothing but take away what we already own. Also just because Sony is selling more does not mean Xbox isnt making a profit. The vision is clear where MS want to go with Xbox. If you spend less than your profit targets wont be as high, if you spend more than your profit targets become alot higher. Trust me you dont need a generation leap to improve on visuals on games. Like i said PCs dont use generation leaps however everyone with different specced PCs can play the same games. Some will play them better than others. Much like X1X will play X1X2 games just at a degraded performance. |
You are talking like the beefed up consoles didn't had their own R&D costs. It's not like they found the X1X in the floor of a factory. It's the same stuff, only diluded in more frequent investiments. Also, if you look at the profits of Sony's gaming division, the PS4 barely made them put a tiny loss during a fiscal year, followed by big profits. The previous gen console can offset this expenses since it sells with a big profit margin. And that's with the problematic PS3 carrying the division. The PS5 will have an easier time since we can have a 150 bucks PS4 carrying it. The only thing they can't do is pull a freaking PS3, but that was beyond stupid and they only escaped from a sounding beat from MS because they were lucky enough to have MS screwing up their entire first 3 years. That gen would've be the 3 stooges, but Nintendo at least was being reasonable.
PC have the largest community, but not the largest AAA gaming community, the guys with beefed up PCs with GPUs. Most of them are just playing on laptops and other PCs they already have for other reasons. This segment isn't investing on dedicated hardware. That's exactly the segment of consoles, people that will pay hundreds of dollars in gaming hardware. We can't put everyone in the same basket and try to outline a strategy from it.
Sony isn't just selling more, they are profiting more with PS4. MS isn't showing their Xbox numbers, which clearly shows that it's not as good as the competition. Sony also masked numbers by cramping divisions together when they were performing badly. Nobody hides numbers when they're good, if they were at least close to getting similar profits they would boost about it (note: I'm talking about the game division, not the whole MS, of course).
Also, nobody will lose their library if there's BC. PS4 doesn't have it because of the architecture of the PS3. The next consoles will have it since they will all be x86 from now on, until someone comes with a better architecture.
I know we don't need generational leaps to show improvements. But a new gen shows a big leap that encourages people to pay for new hardware. It has the "wow" factor. And that's hard to beat.
It also looks clear that a clean slate helps to show dramatic improvements. The X1X is massively more powerful than the X1, still, the games look basically the same but in 4K. Of course it is better, but if you put a PS360 2010 game side-by-side with a PS4 game, the difference is huge.
I get that it's perfectly doable to forget gens altogether. But I belive that, if MS goes the no-gen route, it doesn't matter how good the next X1s will be, a shiny new-gen PS5 would steal the thunder and make it look obsolete. People like big new annoucements. Does the buzz made by the X1X looks minimally similar to PS4 or X1 launch? Not even close. The buzz generated by the Switch is also much, much higher.
