| LongLiveTheBeatles said: Microsoft's strategy is pretty flawed. It's good idea to release a console maybe a year or so before the others where the extra amount of time the competition has to develop more won't make a big difference-(the graphical difference between the PS3 and the 360), but when you have two or three years between the two, there's a good chance technical differences will be very noticeable and hype by itself would be enough to overtake the console that is first to the market. Just look at the way the PS2 destroyed the Dreamcast. Then the Xbox came out a year after the PS2. While there was a technical difference, it wasn't big enough to stop the momentum. If Microsoft wants to be successful next generation releasing their console somewhere in 2010, they will not be able to use their traditional strategy of boosting the console's power. Sales will have to be fueled by an innovation, which isn't something they are synonymous with. Technology is moving faster and faster and I guarantee that if the PS4 is released in 2012 or 2013, the Next Xbox will get blown out of the water. |
Every generation the noticeable technical improvements made over a year get dramatically less impressive; even today there was a thread questioning whether Metal Gear Solid 4 was "Better Looking" than Crysis even though Crysis requires a graphics card dramatically more powerful (probably representitive of 2 years of console development) that the PS3's GPU to run it at high detail at HD resolutions at a decent framerate.
I believe we're soon going to hit a point where the only improvements are so subtile that they mostly go unnoticed by the vast majoity of gamers. Basically, consider what the PS3 and XBox 360 can produce visually at a resolution of 480p @24fps; this will probably be very similar in appearance to pre-rendered movies that are released on DVD. Within a couple of years we will be able to reach (roughly) the quality of pre-rendered movies in realtime and the only difference between a system and its competition released 3 years later will be a slight improvement in lighting and reflections.
