@twilighterror: Great for marketing but bad for bottom lines. As consoles become obsolete quicker, ie 4 year cycles, more and more console gamers will simply move back to getting Uber Powerful PCs. What's the point in paying royalty fees on game sales to MS and Sony when the consoles are not future proof?
Might as well build your powerful PC since most games are multiplat anyways.
@hardeddie: It is wishful thinking to compare Phones to Consoles. Nobody likes to put money up front for upgrades unless you're a billionaire nouveau riche Chinese Tycoon. Sadly, there aren't many of those outside of China.
Upgrades costs for phones are hidden in phone contracts, the subsidies for Cellular providers drove the by-annual phone upgrade craze.
Sadly as you say, there is no such thing for consoles. This trend will have dire consequences in the long run. You might see a mass migration of console gamers back to PC, since almost all games are now cross-platform.
@simonbelmont2: Thanks I'm glad you guys enjoyed it, I just call it as it is, cause you know the Gamespot reporter is not gonna tell it the way it is, they're gonna read off their cue card and play along with MS and Sony.
One thing I learned in life is that when someone is trying to sell you snake oil, the first thing they do is bring out some supposed industry experts, like the nerd you see up there to vouch for how great it is.
When you see a bunch of so called industry experts smiling in their nerd shirts and saying how great this is for the industry, you know that its BS.
Sad, the quality of Gamespot reporting, I was actually hoping to read some genuine hard questions, but it turned out to be another puff piece to promote mid-gen upgrades. How can anyone sit there with a straight face as someone tells you that they plan on never resetting the console userbase and continue to support one console for decades? That's something you tell gradeschool children, not veteran Gamespot reporters.
@kaminobenimizu: Something about glassless parallax 3D that makes handheld games better. I don't think I can play a handheld game on a normal 2D display anymore, after 3DS.
For me glassless 3D will be the selling point for the NX, if they don't release a 3D enabled version of the NX, I might skip it. The only reason I'm even getting the console is to replace my 3DS, so if there is no 3D, then I'm not really interested, sadly.
3DS spoiled me, I can't even play handheld games in 2D anymore. LOL
@Ultramarinus: Good luck getting a Cell Phone to run any of the games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Both systems are over a decade old.
The previous generation was light years ahead of the curve in hardware, that's why both Sony and MS lost massive amounts of money on their initial release models.
The notion that Cell Phones are making quantum leaps in gaming performance is a myth. IPhone 6 considered of the leaders in Cell Phone gaming performance, can barely run a watered down Mortal Kombat X for any longer than 20 minutes without overheating and eating up a full battery cycle.
Cellphones are good for Bejewelled, and Chinese MMOs, but that's about it.
In short, you're splitting a console's life span into 2 cycles per each gen, allowing for 2 tiers of gaming.
You'll now have PS4 shit version. And PS4 good version. This will remove all incentives for developers to fine tune their code for the weaker console as they will simply suggest you get the faster console for the best performance. This will also push early adopters away from consoles, as most will simply wait for the better faster version.
The notion that these consoles will continue to be supported for 10 years is extremely naïve, and the notion of never resetting your console's userbase back to zero is also incredibly naïve. At some point in time the difference from one console an another will be so vast that you will lose all cross-generational support. Its like trying to play modern AAA PC game using a 10 year old CPU and GPU, good luck with that.
Bottom line consoles generations will still be roughly 8 years as was before, but only difference is there will now be 2 consoles released in 4 year intervals, which negates the console manufacturers need to take a loss leader on the consoles initial release.
Its a lot of fancy jive talk, what it all boils down to is console manufacturers no longer want to take a massive loss on their consoles by making them 4 years more advanced then they need to be, instead they will now just release the consoles at a profit, and sell you two different versions each generation. The only reason XB360 and PS3 lasted so long is cause they were light years ahead of their time, but releasing them as such, require both MS and Sony to take massive losses on hardware sales, which they no longer wanna do.
Sounds great for the console manufacturer, but in actuality its horrible for the consumer. The only reason console manufacturers deserved to reap in the software royalty fees from all games sold to begin with is that they provided a future proof hardware at a loss to ensure 8 years of viability. Remove that from the equation and we're all better off just getting PCs.
@7tizz: I guess you and I feel different about this. I felt that the only way for Nintendo to compete with Sony and MS in the home console market was to create a super system at 4K that can outperform both Scorpio and Neo, but since they will never do that, I felt the second best option was to go pure handheld, which is what they did.
The way I see it, unless Nintendo goes 8 teraflops and does pure 4K, it was pointless for them to continue fighting Sony and MS on the home console front, it'll just be Wii U all over again.
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