torok said:
If it does 20M units while the regular model keeps the pace, I would call it a success. Nobody can expect these devices to sell as good as the regular models since they will be almost 2 times the price. It's more like a high-end model to avoid people jumping to PC towards the end of the gen. I remeber when I bought a cheap GTX650 in 2012. It was a ridiculously cheap GPU, way cheaper than a PS3 or 360. It ran Crysis on high-ultra @ 30 fps, Metro almost on ultra. PS360 looked like garbage. Right now, I have a 970, which is a pretty beefy GPU and was basically the price of my PS4 by itself. It doesn't run the games significantly better than the PS4 while my entire PC probably costs 2 times its price, so it's a tough sell for the masses. I see these consoles having more legs than huge initial sales. As the years pass, they will become cheaper and cheaper and towards the end of the gen late adopters will be more inclined to buy the more powerful model since it won't be as outdated as the regular model. I also don't see it as doesn't having its importance. PS360 after 2012 were a catastrophe. Almost all big games flopped and they lost users to mid-end PCs. Neo and Scorpio can remove this effect towards the last few years of the gen since they will still pack a good punch. The alternative would be return to 5 years generations. It's not feasible anymore because complex games sometimes take 5 years to arrive. If PS360 had ended up in 2010-11, most of the best games would not make it on time or arrive in the last year. Actually, PS3 lineup only got good in 2011. |
I find myself favoring the 5 year hardware cycle, even at the expense of extreme upgrades to specs. And no, I don't mind buying a new console every 5 years assuming they don't rise exponentially in cost with each subsequent release, which won't happen because of the way the console consumer base is structured.
At this point, no consumer should realistically expect proprietary "black magic" technology (and the massive R&D this requires) that resets the standards each generation. All that manufacturers really have to do is take advantage of advances and developments in fabrications processes, ICs, memory, cost adjustments, etc. of the time to update designs with the appropriate customizations to suit their target needs.
I'm fairly certain the days of expecting manufacturers to dump their products at a significant loss are over which does favor a hardware cycle in which manufacturers aren't locked into a X year requirement in production before hardware cost losses can be recouperated.
Nintendo has actually had that flexibility for generations; the only reason the Wii lasted as long as it did was due to its early success. Notice how quickly the Wii U is wrapping up its product life cycle by comparison. Nintendo sold it at a profit from launch so the key losses to their bottom line were to the brand (due to low sales) and consumer perception that they are abandoning a platform too early (four years) due in large to the unusual length of the 7th gen. Consumers got a lot of mileage out of 7th gen consoles by comparison, particularly those who were early adopters.
Notice how current console designs are more like a cross between desktop PCs and mobile devices; their designs can be significantly and continually upgraded utilizing advances in the previously mentioned areas without having to start with a clean sheet of paper.
Again, I would point to Nintendo to show how they have been reusing existing designs with upgrades and updates without resorting to that blank slate hardware architecture approach.
While the lengthy development pipeline for certain games is certainly a factor, this is nothing new. It's no different than developing a game with a projected 3 year development pipeline for a console that is in its 3rd or 4th year of market availability. Would any publisher realistically finance such a project without having a contingency plan that included adopting/porting their game for an as of yet not existent future console? Of course not.
