Epic: 'If next-gen consoles aren't bleeding edge, Apple will beat them'

[Mr Khan]

happydolphin said:

Mr. Khan, here is where your usual arguments make total sense. These people are completely deluded. Allow me to nitpick:

"The only way they're going to go away is if they don't stay true to what they are. The console gaming experience is about delivering something that's way out past the bleeding edge and subsidising it through the software royalty model - just like Apple does with the phones. It's not that much different."

The console gaming experience has never been about delivering bleeding edge. The N64 was bleeding edge and failed relative to the Playstation. It's Nintendo's games that kept them afloat (thankfully).

The Playstation was high-end, but not cuttin-edge, not even bleeding edge for its time.

The famicom/NES was a good system, but I can't see how it could be called bleeding edge. It was mainstream VG hardware (a tad above Master System), but it was the games (Mario), the quality of service (accepting to service damaged units), the marketing and targetting (toy stores in NA) and the policies (licensing model) that made its success.

In NA, the SNES, released end of August 1991, a great console, launched roughly around the same time as the Phillips CD-i launched: October 1991. Which is more bleeding-edge and which failed more miserably? The CD-i. Priced at 1000$ with all kinds of CD playback, it failed to sell more than 570 000 units lifetime. The SNES sold 49.10M.

He added: "That's the console gaming model, and if you don't do that - if you don't stretch just far enough, you don't just have enough of a difference to make people want to take the leap with you... it all falls down.

That's totally true. It happened with the HD market with the Wii...

However, there is a baseline required for the leapfrog. With gen5, it was optical compatibility and 3D graphics (at a minimum, PSX sufficed). With gen 6, it was updated graphics (PS2 sufficed). With gen 7, it was HD (high quality 480p would have sufficed).

In gen 8, 1080p at 30fps suffices, some games can have a lower resolution and faster framerate if needed. That is the needed difference, with obviously sufficient processing power for AI and displaying multiple on-screen objects. Anything more than that is...

OVERKILL.

And as we've seen it countless times, overkill can hurt, even destroy a platform's strategy. PS3's cell processor, PS2's emotion engine, N64's expensive cartridges as compared to CDs to save loading times... , XBox 1's overly powered system, with little return, the Game Gear, the CD-i, and so on and so forth.

I did not feel the need to go into depth because Epic's argument is merely a veil for a desperate attempt to pitch a product. If one wished to read into this more deeply, Epic might be signaling that Unreal Engine 4 might actually be a little much for what Wii U and the rumored NextBox are pitching (not sure if enough is known of PS4 even in rumor), and so are making hyperbolic statements like this to try to actually have a middleware market next gen. Odd statements like this could be signaling that Epic has overshot the market.