mrklaw said:
Who is Kinect sellign to though? If its the mainstream/casual market, they can still launch a new console for enthusiasts etc. Combine with a lower price for the kinect/Xbox bundle, might work well
That's a damn good point. All the weakass cpus and gpus that people are proposing, who's this console going to appeal to?
Casuals have no real incentive to upgrade. It's not like 360 and PS3 have bad graphics, and Kinect and Move already offer them anything that next gen motion controls could.
Tech enthusiasts (aka. early adopters) aren't going to be satisfied with a console that is a generation behind the upcoming competitors. And these are also often the same people that buy up the most games. This is a segment you don't want to lose to the competition.
Assuming that Microsoft or Sony make a significantly weaker console than the other, whichever competitor has the most technically advanced console will gobble up
nearly ALL of the multiplatform game sales from multiconsole owners. And hardcore gamers (the ones that buy up ~10 games every year and fuel much of the profit, are almost always multiconsole owners). If you give up sales of multiplatform games from these people to your competitor by releasing a significantly weaker system, you're shooting yourself in the foot, with a shotgun.
Multiplatform games are Microsoft's bread and butter. Losing these sales to the PS4 is not a smart long term strategy. Because Nintendo opted to make a weaker console than compeitors, it has horrible multiplatform and third party game sales, so bad that third parties stopped making games for it for the most part. The Wii succeded because of motion controls and first party icons like Mario, not because of it's third party support. Third party sales, with the very occasional exception, are on life support.
Other than Nintendo staple titles, consumers had no interest in buying third party games on the Wii that look a generation behind games on the 360/PS3 games. Multiplatform sales were pathetic, and the weak graphics was a huge part of the reason why. Do you realize how much it would hurt Microsoft if they lost support from third party developers on account of being significantly behind the PS4 and PC.
pooptacular said:
The current "monster" gpus of now will be much much cooler at 28nm. Also much cheaper. I could see the next microsoft console having a 69xx equivalent card just die shrunk.
If its fusion then it will prob be something with 1000-1200 shader units, 64 texture units etc.
Exactly. I swear the people here saying the next gen won't/doesn't need to even be on par with current high end gpus can't see past the year 2014.
If the next-gen consoles can't even keep up with today's gpus, do you have any idea how dated they will look by 2016, much less near the end of the console cycle in 2022 or so?
The PS4 in all likelihood will use Nvidia again, show up late 2014 and have Nvidia base the gpu on the monster Nvidia Maxwell architecture.
That's what PC games and the PS4 games will be designed around from 2014-2022 or whenever the next gen ends. Microsoft if they were smart would opt to use something from AMD that is roughly on par, even if they have to wait till 2014 to do so. Microsoft can't afford to lose early adopters and tech enthusiasts that also happen to be the exact same people that buy the vast bulk of the games each generation, and they can't survive losing multiplatform game sales and third parties either.
