If the 9th gen consoles launch with BC in 2020, is there any reason to produce 8th gen consoles beyond 2020?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Mr Puggsly said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

The NVidia RTX 2080 came out a couple months ago. Is there any reason NVidia produce other cards, as they are all weaker?

Might seem dumb, but that's exactly the kind of argument you're using here. And of course there will be a couple reasons:

1. Much cheaper. An XBO or PS4 will be about half the price, if not even less, than their successors.
2. The general public probably doesn't know about the backwards compatibility, either.
3. The proposed $300 Xbox next probably won't come at launch. What's the point of having a console that's weaker than the One X when the latter would still be selling? They'd rather just make next gen games run on the X, much cheaper.

1. That didn't really happen with 360 and PS3. They stayed expensive, especially if you wanted a console with a HDD.

2. The public will know about BC if it gets hyped and they could demonstrate how it will improve 8th gen games.

3. The big question is can they launch next gen hardware for $299. IF THEY CAN, then it makes sense to kill off 8th gen hardware quickly. I don't think its crazy to assume they could make something with X1X GPU power in 2020 for $299. The X1X will be three years old at that point. Maybe MS will be willing to lose some money on hardware given all the subscription services.

1. Don't expect PS5 below 499$, at which point even a 249$ pricepoint would still be just half as much.

2. Improve 8th gen games? Very doubtful, as that would need new textures and code on games that don't sell anymore. It's just not worth it for the publishers, they'd rather release a remastered version to sell it again to you. Sony might do that for their own games, but that's about it.

3. Even in 7nm the chip for the X1X would still be huge and expensive, too expensive to sell the chip alone for less than 120$ to Microsoft. At 359mm2, it's 50% bigger than a Polaris chip, and the 7nm process would just bring that down to about Polaris size. Add to this the RAM and any other parts and you're very quickly above a 300$ Pricetag. since your 300$ build is supposed to be at least X1X power, you'll have to accept also X1X price, and by then that should still be around 400$