Refresh consoles vs. 9th gen

[Arkaign]

I guess my primary resistance to them is the half-baked nature of it all. I feel it will lengthen a gen and give us more years tied to weaknesses of 2013-era hardware. Problems like uneven MP competition is also a new wrinkle in consoles that people used to use as an attack on PC gaming (eg; the example earlier where PS4 Pro players will have greatly enhanced distance clarity on maps, steadier FPS, etc).

Console hardware itself has never been the real source of profits either. It comes from software, accessories, and services sales. So, expanding the market is the best way to go about it, and it seems to me the most likely buyers of PS4 Pros and Scorpios are owners of existing PS4s or X1s, which doesn't grow the audience in the same way.

Look at the examples of the PS1 and PS2, massively successful platforms that continued to grow their audiences by continually supporting the platform with a wealth of games, and with ever more affordable units. Bearing this in mind, I think PS could have found more success and profit by pushing for a $199 PS4 slim for Fall 2016 instead of splitting the models. Let's hypothesize that $199 would be absolutely scraping the edge of profitability, or even losing a small sum per unit. I believe that the growth in sales would more than make up for that element, as $199 is a magic price point that can really surge and reach people in ways that $299 can't do, and even $249 is tough. With MP requiring subs, extra controllers being $50+, etc, this seems like a more logical path to me.

The professed reasoning for the PS4 Pro also seems bizarrely counter intuitive to me as well : said to be a response to the threat of PC gaming I believe I heard. That's asinine. Console gamers tend to be, and stay, console gamers. The PS4 Pro is not competition to a well specced PC anyway, not in 2016, and especially not as a year or two passes. The target moves too quickly for that to be a reasonable explanation, because even if PCs were $500, and all ran 4K at 120FPS in all games, console gamers by and large wouldn't change to PC, because they prefer consoles.

If anything, adding a new model introduces more of the PC issues, the equal-playing-ground multiplayer concern listed above, the added developer work, the uneven support (eg; Bloodborne gets no PS4P patch, while Knack gets a PS4P patch .. ??), new bugs (yes, some people say this won't be an ongoing issue, but how often have we heard that before).

The worst of it all to me personally is the extension of the 8th generation, hamstrung by poor CPU performance even in 2013. Without the half-gen models, a true 9th gen would almost certainly arrived sooner. Making prettier games that struggle sometimes to hit 30fps or have sophisticated AI/depth is not my idea of a great thing compared to a big leap forward.