Are there any benefits to shorter lifespans for consoles?

[KBG29]

vivster said:

Imagine a PS5 selling next year with double the hardware, same architecture. Price point maybe 500-600? It will have perfect backwards compatibility and will be able to play all next and old gen games in 1080p60.

And yet you have people object to this great future.

IMO, that would not be a PS5. If Sony and Microsoft want to take consoles down that road, then I am perfectly fine with it, but new console should only come at a quantum leap in tech. I would basically consider what you are talking about as a PS4s similar to apples mid cycle upgrades. Basically they would sell one PS4 version of the game at retail, and it would just run better if you had the 4s or whatever. 

I honestly think this is a really good idea when they hit the next chip shrink. They can easily slap say 4 more CPU cores, and 10 more CU's on the GPU, and increase to 12GB of GDDR5. That should be able to hit the market at $399 in 2017, and it would hold people over tell 2021 or 2022 when a true PS5 could come out on new architecture.

It is hard to get it across to people that consoles can evelove as long as they have the same architecture. I have been trying to get this same point across with the Vita. Sony could easily make a 4G Vita with 3GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of built in memory, and 24 hour battery life. At this point they could sell something like that for $300 and it could completely eliminate the need for a cell phone. However, people just put up a wall when your talk about refreashing a console mid-cycle. It angers me greatly that smart phones and tablets can get away with this at 200% mark up and people do back flips, but on a console selling at or below the bill of material this is an outrage. 

If Sony and MS did this, then the consoles would be relevent enough to the point were people would start replacing their smart phones, tablets, and PC's. Due to more people using them they would get more and more 3rd party apps just like ios and android have due to mass usage. This would put actual gaming devices in the hands of maybe 500M people instead of 250M, and the more people that have gaming consoles, is more people buying games, which means more money for games pubs and devs, which means more new ip's, and more games for us. 

To sum it up. Mid-cycle refreash, same system, same tech, just on steroids = good. Shorter console cycle, new branding, different tech = to confusing and potantially disasteruos. But, thats just my opinion.