kowenicki said:
Johnw1104 said:
Does it not seem like consoles are rather dangerously blurring the lines between consoles and PC with these upgrades? Mainly, the primary draw of the console is that once you purchase the singular object you get to play games indefinitely. These guys seem to be adopting a hardware/mobile approach with frequent upgrades which, in my mind, takes away from the pro's column of console ownership.
Perhaps it's just a one time deal as this gen's consoles were historically weak and inexpensive. I'm frustrated as I can't find the source I used to reference (just spent 20 minutes scouring google), but I recall that, if one removes the additional expense of the Kinect for the Xbox1 and the Gamepad for the Wii U, each of the three consoles were the cheapest to produce (adjusted for inflation) of any console they've made to this date. In truth, I cannot recall if the Wii U was cheaper than the Wii or second to it, but the general narrative is that we received weak hardware this time around that was dated the moment it hit the shelves.
This seems like it might be a trend, though. I suppose there's a history of it (CD peripherals/sega 32x/many DS and 3DS upgraded models), but this seems somewhat unique. |
as long as you have games that can be played at different levels of fidelity on concurrently available hardware and you have backwards compatibility.... whats wrong with that?
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I would say nothing if everything goes swimmingly. It can be frustrating to consumers to buy a product only to have it be dated moments later (as someone who bought his 3DS XL literally 3 weeks before they announced the "New" version I can attest to that), though, and if my experience on the PC is any indictation developers will inevitably design their games with the superior hardware in mind. This often results in poor performance and a bad experience on the lesser hardware.
I know they're promising that won't happen, but I'll certainly need to see proof of this as that happens all the time on the PC, which is why those of us on the PC feel obligated to keep pace with the hardware in a way we never had to stress with consoles.
