Neither that nor the OP scenario is ideal. 5-6 years with some support a while after that is a healthy time for a generation.

Absolutely not. Imo a console gen should last no longer than 7 years and no less than 5. 6 years is the sweetspot in my opinion. The vast majority of people would not even waste their time with something like this. MS would even lose money on the concept due to potential sales being too low to turn a profit (even if they sell at a "profit"), due to R&D costs.

If all consoles followed this method, I would just go PC where the games are cheaper on steam. If I am going to be milked for that much money, I may as well at that point.

It can also end bad. Because how many units does this store hold, for each one. Shelf space is a major problem.

You mean PC owners?   Yeah no need for this.   MS would be litterally pulling money out of another of their own markets (Which I suppose they already like doing...).

I think the NX will be the one to do that, only every two years instead. XBO wasn't really designed, at least as far as I'm aware, to support that kind of platform. What I think they'll do is actually make the next Xbox a windows machine. Then they'll just sell an easy to understand upgradable peripheral something like once a year that can be swapped out easily.

Something like that N64 ram whatever, only more encompassing. And I think they'll be exerting of it. People shit on windows games on PC because its too console like, but that shit would be perfect for a steam machine-like platform.

It would be fine, but as long as future models are upgradable (and upgrade is easy/simple like the N64 RAM upgrade was).

It's not like your old Xbox would stop working. Even in the PC world this is not how it works.

I built my PC *FIVE* years ago with a Nvidia GTX 570 GPU, which was wasn't even the top of the line GPU of that time (more like upper mid-range, the 580 was higher end) ... and today that GPU can still run new games like Street Fighter V and it can run The Witcher 3 at 1080P at medium settings. Totally playable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ORVwS377Ck

It can run Star Wars Battlefront at 1080P 60 fps too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugPmeBzXAI

People need to get over their fear that upgradable hardware = your older hardware is instantly useless.

A new console every 5 years and having BC is what makes sense. This is how it used to be

I'm not sure if such a plan is very logical.

What are the realistic benefits?

- Some games, the ones optimized for this method, would look better on the 2.0 version and possibly run smoother if there were earlier overhead problems on the 1.0 version.

What else? If the plan is full forwards- and backwards compatibility then substantial upgrades would be meaningless. More RAM, for example, would have little real benefit since new games would still have to run on the old configuration. The games would have to be built and structured around the same limitations.

What are the potential negatives?

- No price drops unless Microsoft is willing to manufacture separate SKUs for awhile. If they do not run separate SKUs then the people who wait on price-drops would probably look elsewhere.

- Assuming Microsoft never increases the price past the launch price, the margins are just too low to allow for much of an upgrade without losing money. Keep in mind that R&D and manufacturing costs would spike with every new "version", so we're not simply talking about hardware costs.

- Product confusion. Never underestimate the potential of consumers to be confused. Most people do not follow gaming news on a daily or weekly basis. It would be difficult and expensive to keep consumers educated.

- The potential of people on the 1.0 systems to get shafted. It will end up happening at least once or twice, where someone comes out and says, "you need the upgraded version to get the true experience," which is developer talk for, "it runs like crap on the old configuration and we don't really care."

- If this resulted in longer generations with more "upgrades" inside that are fully forwards/backwards compatible, then it could effectively retard game development even more. If Microsoft had two upgrade periods, that would be about 9 years of life for the original platform, for which all games would still have to work. Every three years does not feel realistic.

As for upgradeable consoles, please, no. Many of the people who buy consoles over PC do so because they can't or don't want to deal with technical issues. Even worse, there would be more generational fracturing, which always leads to confusion.

Part of me wonders if Microsoft just wants to fix the eSRAM issue and get something better in place while using this as an excuse.

It could also be mostly PR with a tiny dose of reality. Rather small upgrades with a ton of ballyhoo that are meant more to draw attention from the "core gamer" than they are to make any real difference.

There are a lot of different scenarios. We'll just have to wait and see how it plays out.

Upgrading can be easy on a console, there's no reason it has to be hard/difficult, it could be as easy as swapping in/out the HDD.

Fragmentation is overblown, even on PC, look at my example above. My 5 year old graphics card runs pretty much all the modern games of today.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this model as people buy multiple SKU's of a single console many times. I had 4 Xbox 360's at retail last gen and am on my second Xbox One.

I bet a large majority of gamers are also in the same position.