What defines a Generation?

[potato_hamster]

Shadow1980 said:

Intrinsic said:

 

And if consoles become hardware agnostic like how PC stuff is, then like the PC we will cease to have "generations" in the console space. Which I think is what this is all really about.

I doubt that consoles will become "hardware agnostic." The current paradigm has worked quite well and there's no reason to change it.

Why sell 100M consoles. then toss all that away and start all over again investing billions in R&D and marketing when you can spend a fraction of that cost and just iterate on the hardware and keep going and selling to the exact same install base. 

The problem with that is that there's no guarantee that continuous spec upgrades have any more capacity than other hardware revisions to keep a platform going indefinitely. A console's sales life typically follows a roughly bell-shaped curve, with a period of growth after launch, a period of peak sales, and finally a terminal decline phase where sales irreversibly diminish. It's that decline phase that prompts companies to release next-gen hardware. The console cycle is literally a cycle, similar to the tides except with sales.

We've had hardware upgrades before, whether it was in the form of boosts to the specs or in the form of accessories that offer new capabilities, but they all failed to stop the inevitable post-peak decline in sales and had to be replaced by something that was a true generational leap. You can only squeeze so much out of an existing platform before a new one needs to come out to replace it.

In fact, every time there has been a hardware upgrade, we saw a temporary increase in sales in the first few months that follow, and then sales dropped back to the same decline the console experiences before the introduction of the ugraded console. It has never done anything to improve long-term sales.