| Shadow1980 said:
So, long story short, new generations of consoles are dictated not only by technological advancements but also by business concerns. If spec upgrades to existing platforms are to be the future, they need to do something past spec upgrades have failed to do and have the same effect on sales as entire new generations would. But if history is any indication, nothing will keep the PS4 platform from reaching a peak and enterting a terminal decline phase, thus forcing Sony to release a PS5 to keep hardware sales up. Not only will abandoning the concept of generations for simple spec upgrades to existing platforms have implications for other issues that have been discussed before (e.g., game development, consumer confidence), it will have implications regarding the very viability of the console market itself. It is not unreasonable to assume that, eventually, people will stop buying PS4s in any appreciable quantity no matter how often Sony boosts the CPU speed or GPU power by small, incremental amounts. A PS5 is going to be necessary at some point, and waiting another 8-10 years for the tech to advance enough to be "worth it" in some people's eyes isn't going to change that. |
Well said. I do understand why you may say that a proper PS5 may be necessary. and that is attributed to the fact that at some point people will just stop buying incrementally upgraded PS4s..... but the thing about this thing is that sound arguments can be made for any perspective one chooses to look at everything from.
You are basically talking about a world where hardware hitting the rice price point and library density results in it having a peak sales marker for that generation. And that after that the only thing that will result in another uotake of hardware and it's resultant peak is new hardware. New generational hardware.
I'm suggesting that there isn't a chart for what may end up happening with incremental hardware released yet. Cause then it's not about every having a peak, but about selling consistently good number every year. Then it becomes more about install base retention than about getting new customers. Sony wouldn't care if they are selling only 8M consoles a year to ppl that want the latest and bst version of their console if that 8M is only adding to an active install base of over 150M aquired over a 9yr period. And the difference between consoles and mobile phones or other incrementally upgraded tech, is that the money really comes from buying software and not the hardware itself.
The biggest standout benefit of this system to the platform holder is that it prevents them from ever having to do a hard reset and start all over again. And trust me, I'm sure publishers are just as ecstatic about that as the olatform holders.
