If Sony and Microsoft Only Release Consoles On A Par With Wii U...

[DanneSandin]

HappySqurriel said:
I think people expecting a big jump in image quality from Sony and Microsoft are going to be disappointed ...

First off, neither Sony or Microsoft are going to be willing (or in Sony's case able) to take the same kind of losses with their next systems that they took with the PS3 and XBox 360. I could be wrong but I suspect that both Sony and Microsoft are going to have losses that are in the $50 to $100 range (or lower) rather than the $150 to $200+ that they had in the previous generation.

Secondly, I think both Sony and Microsoft will be looking to enhance gameplay using a new user-interface/controller (something like Kinect or a touch-screen controller), which will likely add $50 to $100 to the manufacturing cost of the system.

Finally, they will want to keep the price of the system to consumers at a reasonable level ($400) to encourage people to buy it.

When you add these three things together, compared to the XBox 360 at launch their next system has to have a $200+ reduction in manufacturing cost, and the next Playstation has to have a $400+ reduction in manufacturing cost compared to the PS3, which will translate into a very large step back in how advanced these systems are.

If the XBox 360 or PS3 were launched with similar constraints I would expect that they would have had about 1/4 or 1/2 their current processing power. At 480p these systems would be able to maintain the improvements people associate with these consoles, but at HD resolutions the visual improvement would be far more modest. In a similar fashion, at 720p the PS4 and "XBox 720" will likely have many visual improvements but will not be able to improve visuals signficiantly while rendering at 1080p@60fps

Say either of MS or Sony takes a $100 hit on every sold console (more likely that MS will/can do so) and has some sort of new interface controler that costs $50-100 and launches at $400, the actual cost for the console would be somewhere around $400-450 - wouldn't that be enough of a leap compared to Wii U's total cost of $250 (excluding the pad)?

I agree with you though, it won't be a massive leap, but I'm just curious as to if my question above would put PS720 ahead in regards of power making the Wii U look like next gen...