Shaping the Next Generation Consoles

[freedquaker]

 

   Based on the complaints and praises of this generation, I'll speculate on how the next generation console will or should be...

* Keep the Prices Affordable

Wii was/is the cheapest console and is selling like crazy. Xbox 360 has a cheaper version but you also need to buy a hard drive sooner or later, and subscribe to the live service etc.

* Keep the models simple

There is only one wii model out there and people are not confused which one to choose. They are assured that there is only one wii model which will require no other complications and work from the get-go. With 360 or ps3, you need to decide which one to buy and what else to buy.

* Bundle a game with the system

Games have been quite expensive and people MUST buy a game with it (unless they use it for other purposes). This will increase their cost. Another reason why wii is so successfull is that it comes with a bundled game, so from day one, you have something to play at a very affordable price, besides no other complications.

* Do not go ahead of time

Amiga was ahead of its time (multi-tasking, multiple processors, highly advanced graphics etc). Sega saturn was ahead of its time (multiple processors), Sega Dreamcast was ahead of its time (internet connectivity, browser etc), but none of them worked well. It's much safer, more profitable and less risky to adopt a well known technology and harness the very best out of it at the most efficient way. It might have other advantages for sony but using Blu-ray on ps3 proved to be extremely harmfull to the gaming division. The same is true for cell processor. On the other hand, DVD or the processors that MS and Nintendo are using very well suited to the time; cheaper and much more efficient with a comparable performance (wii is a special situation though).

* Be Development Friendly

This has some correlation with "going ahead of time". It's best to keep a similiar programming and architechtural structure on console design with development and programming friendly tools. This was/is the case with original psx and both of the xboxes, gamecube and wii. Not so much with Saturn, n64, ps2 and ps3. Imagine the number of titles that appear both on 360 and pc but not on ps3, or titles being inferior on ps3 because of architectural difficulties and diffierences. It could also give an advantage to keep the architecture similiar to a well known system like PCs or Macs.

* Keep it small, compact/sleek, light, and cute or classy

All nintendo console for the last few generations have fulfilled these criteria. Xbox was an ugly giant. 360, being much better, is not shining with such a huge brick adaptor! PS2 was small enough but had a stupid shape. PS3 is classy but too chunky.

* Keep it energy efficient, silent and robust

360 deeps the rock bottom with that. Its slightly more energy efficient than ps3 but a lot nosier, with a bulky adaptor and highly susceptible to be broken! Wii does not have any of these issues.

* Make it generically upgradable

By upgrade, I dont mean a PC style upgrade. Firms should produce their products with the lowest denominator to keep the costs as low as possible but should make it possible to upgrade certain aspects of the console at will thru generic third party firms. For example, the console could be shipped with a 20 GB hard drive but the user should be able to buy relatively cheap hard drives as an upgrade.

* Eliminate the bottlenecks and parallelize

Most of the performance increase in the next generation will not come from performance leaps, but from the elimination of the bottlenecks. This generation is more of a transition phase and firms were focused on adopting new technologies like bluray, hd etc, most of which will be mature enough next gen, so they will focus on the bottlenecks like memory then. The main Ram and graphics Ram will not be anything less than 1 GB each, while firms will use the next generation media like bluray or propriety format apparently bigger than dvd. Hard drive will be several times bigger as well.  We will see multiple core Cpus, but dont expect anything revolutionary, maybe more efficient and slightly faster models, with programmers more used/exposed to better parallelizing algorithms. We can expect a bigger increase in graphics chip performances thru parallelization.

* Invest more on the downloadable content

There are going to be more stuff to download than to buy, and the revenue from those might catch up and even surpass the conventional channels. We are going to see a huge increase in movie and possibly game downloads.