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Squilliam on 30 April 2009
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WereKitten said:
Squilliam said:

Even if the hardware is finalised at the end of this year for an end of 2010 release, it will be finalised for the expected market conditions in 2011/12 and beyond.  

The issue with trying to predict the future is that there are so many viable strategies for console makers to employ. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

Shift everything forward in time, then. A cheap DVD player did cost $30 by the end of 2005 and into 2006 - first year of lifetime for the 360. And the market penetration was 75% of USA households by Q3 2005, 81% by Q3 2006  (source: Tom's hardware). I doubt similar costs and market numbers for BluRay in 2011/2012.

But, yeah, I agree that it's all in the air. It's fun, though :)

@azelover

Logically, I'd agree that BluRay will be enough for everything the mass consumer will be interested in for a long while. But I used to think the same about CDROMs and then DVDs, and yet the wretched content creators managed to overflow their capacity again and again :)

I hope we'll come soon to cheaper permanent RAM technologies. Those sound much more future-proof.

The reason why I am so hesitant to consider BR playback as a viable option for some future consoles are the licencing fees. People think that its terrible that consumers buy a PS3 to play BR, I think its even more terrible for Sony if they buy it and ignore BR. If we consider the current fee of $9.50 per player, if only 10% of people buying a PS3 actually use that capability for example then the cost per console of those 10% would be $95 and they would be better off enabling playback using something like a remote and dropping the price by $10 -> See wireless networking argument 107 Xbox 360. 

Its something they have to pay per console whether its used or not, so going forward into the future if fewer consoles are expected to be used for this functionality then I would expect that even if BR players are inside the next Xbox that people will have to pay extra for a remote to enable the functionality. This is especially true if the next generation consoles are designed even more to be internet media hubs rather than designed to play locally stored optical media.

 



Tease.