After decades of platform holders releasing similar hardware, we should celebrate their new, wildly different visions of gaming's future
We're talking about new hardware from all of the biggest players in the console space this week -- but what different stories we're telling.
Sony undoubtedly stole most of the thunder with its unveiling of selected details of the
next-generation PlayStation in a Wired interview with Mark Cerny, but new hardware from both Microsoft and Nintendo is in the spotlight as well;
a cheaper Xbox One S that drops the Blu-Ray drive from the former, and a few more hints at
a pair of forthcoming Switch revisions from the latter.
Mindful of the fact that this is a very early reveal and there's much we still don't know, I don't want to describe the PlayStation hardware Cerny demonstrated as "conventional," but it's certainly evolutionary. It's a console very much within the lineage of those Sony has produced so far; it will of course be embedded in a services ecosystem that few would have imagined when the original PlayStation rolled out in the mid-1990s, but at its heart this promises to be a powerful, meaningful upgrade to a console paradigm we've all known and understood for over 30 years.
By contrast, Microsoft and Nintendo are moving in quite different directions. Microsoft's removal of physical media support from the new Xbox One S is both a statement of intent and a toe in the water. It speaks to the company's vision of Xbox as a gaming platform that spans across devices, powered through a combination of local hardware and Azure cloud services, with physical Xbox consoles being just one mode of access for an Xbox "experience" that's equally at home on a laptop, a tablet or another smart device.
In such a world, the notion of physical media that you stick into a standalone console is not only retrograde, it's outright restrictive. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Microsoft's true next-gen device, whenever it appears, will dispense with physical media entirely, but it's certainly testing the waters and showing clearly where its preference lies.
Nintendo, for its part, is off doing its own Nintendo stuff -- working on new iterations of the Switch that would variously be downsized and possibly ruggedized (a more kid-friendly device than the existing hardware, in other words), and powered-up and more advanced, while also quietly slipping out news that it's working with Tencent to launch the console in the Chinese market. Nintendo has hit a formula that works exceptionally well and which allows it to build a significant market while dodging getting caught in a horsepower arms-race with the other platform holders. It's a trick the company has pulled off before, but the Switch is thus far its most successful execution of the idea.
