Is Phil Spencer really this naive or is this slick acting?

[maxleresistant]

Dante9 said:

maxleresistant said:

Their new plan kind of kills the problem of " If your "piece of plastic" doesn't sell well then that console dies and no more games come to it"

They are ending the generation "reboot", that reboot happening every five/6 years,  and forces you to sell all your old games and consoles because they are now useless.

The problem with that, and why almost every new generation, a new company is leading the market , is that when every manufacturers tells you to throw away everything you bought during the last 6 years and start again from scratch with a new one, you can tell yourself "well, I might as well jump ship and buy another brand this time".

The alternative Microsoft is bringing with scorpio and the next Xbox consoles, is a way of retaining users. They tell you : " you can keep everything, you don't even have to buy a scorpio, we'll make sure scorpio games will be compatible with your old Xbox One. You can upgrade whenever you want for a new model, but nobody is forcing you".

They do all that, because the real money isn't in selling hardware, because those things are sold with an awful profit margin, ranging from tight to "at a loss", the real money is in games, digital content, Gold memberships, and so on.

So their new plan is to make sure you don't leave the Xbox/windows ecosystem,  for Phil Spencer, the console war and the "piece of plastic" VS "piece of plastic" is kind of irrelevant.

Because, if when the PS5 comes out, Sony says "you have to sell all your stuffs to buy new stuffs", basically Sony and their costumers are again back to square one. Microsoft meanwhile, with the scorpio or the next model, will just grow from the user base they started with the Xbox One..

Or it could just as well turn out that the Scorpio will get a pitch for an awesome new game that really cannot run on the X1 and Microsoft will allow it in fear of missing out on a new massive IP. Same for Sony. The PS5 will be backwards compatible from today's point of view, but if some developer comes up with something that really requires all of the new console's power, Sony might allow things on the PS5 that will not run on PS4 or even PS4P. Point being that both MS and Sony are exactly in the same boat, neither one is holier than the other in this regard and their future intentions will become clear only with time.

It doesn't work like that anymore, the reason why the gap in power between the PS3 and PS4 was far smaller than the gap between the PS2 and PS3,  ist the same reason games these days doesn't make a lot of progress in terms of gameplay

The gameplay is not bound by the hardware limitations anymore, we reached a plateau, where all they can do is make bigger open world, more sophisticated AI, more characters on the screen, but nothing forcing you to upgrade to a 6TF 12GB machine. Yes of course the Xbox One version will be scale down in terms of graphics and details, but that's it. What you'll have on scorpio is : VR, better framerate, better graphics (4K, effects, details). 

Right now I can't even think of one game on PS4 or Xbox One that could not have been made on PS360. Think about it like this, if you take aside the graphics what gameplay innovations are so demanding in terms of power that it needs to be on a PS4 or a One? Response is none.

That's the main reason why Nintendo went for Hardware innovation instead of software. They realized that the only way to improve games anymore, was to make them bigger by throwing money at development. So they decided to put 2 screens with one being a touch screen, and that was the biggest change in terms of gameplay possibilities since the first 3D consoles.

To get back to xbox, yes the xbox one support will start to die some day, but it will be a smooth transition over 5 to 10 years, instead of being over 1 to 3 years like we have now. I'm not arguing here that the xbox one will receive plenty of games in 15 years, that would be ridiculous.