It's Bry here. I have been thinking lately about consoles, and each generation that is brought about. It's not unknown that consoles can often cost more than they sell for. A perfect example of this is Sony's PS3. It cost more to make the thing than they made selling it [1]. Perfect business sense? Well not at first no, but as technology becomes older, the cheaper it comes to produce, and therefore more profit can be made. A lot of hardcore gamers will buy this outright, and yes, the company will make a loss, (hey, you're killing the business, what do you think about that?) but with a lot of people not spending their hard earned money on a new console, and waiting for a while to buy into the market, (wait, what's that, the core gamers giving Sony/MS/Nintendo their biggest profit? Who's more valued eh?) they seem to balance everything out. At the same time, it makes you wonder if the red rings/yellow light, and overall delicate-ness of consoles is really a flaw, or something a lot more sinister/money-grabbing.
So far this generation has been around, starting from Xbox 360, from December 2005. That's about to be 6 years, with no announcement of a new generation. (Wii U is a Dreamcast, a mid-gen console -- don't kid yourself. Don't get me wrong, though, I fucking loved the Dreamcast ((possibly best console of all time? haha)))
Consoles have always brought about cutting edge technology (on release), and have been very costly to their producers. A story to be shared of such costly tech was from the Super FX Chip of the SNES, which was first named the MARIO Chip 1. Sounds silly eh? Mario - you know, that dick Italian plumber who's infatuated with a tease of a Princess, however, it's full name was Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation & I/O.
This chip was produced by Argonaut Games, who created a game on the Amiga called Starglider [2] using (at the time) complex wireframe polygons. Nintendo, seeing how impressive this technology was, decided to buy in their own version, thus being able to create the classic Star Fox, and a lot more. What was even more special about this chip was that it was actually IN the game, rather than having to be installed in the console itself. (Remember the "Expansion Pak" anyone?) The chip was a custom-made RISC processor, which was programmed to act as a graphics accelerator, that would draw polygons to a frame buffer in RAM that sat adjacent to it. If this makes no sense, you might as well ignore it.
More recent leaps in gaming technology would be the Cell microprocessor in the PS3. This, I believe will be a great legacy in gaming, as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will all agree that building a in-house processor will be a silly idea, and might as well leave the job to Intel/AMD, as nobody will be able to use the architecture of said processor well enough, as seen when most developers choose to create their multiplatform games on the Xbox and port to PS3. Before anyone gets up in arms about the PS3 exclusives, such as Uncharted, Killzone and Heavy Rain, I will agree that they are all well produced, and they are great at optimising their game using the Cell. However, anyone should agree that industry standards set by Intel and AMD should be good enough for all consoles, and using anything else will be too costly, blah, blah... Anyone into console wars have heard enough of this, so I'll leave it at that.
Back on point, I wanted to ask, how long before a new generation of console? Does it depend on when a company believes it's made enough from the initial loss it makes? Or do said comapnies simply milk the new generation of consoles until they simply cannot do any more? Does it depend on peripherals available, and their lifespan? (Kinect/Move) Or simply until a certain company shows the balls to introduce a mid-generation console, such as the Dreamcast. It certainly seems to be the case in this gen, with the Wii U being announced, then rumours of a 720/PS4 being in the works (although there were inklings of these beforehand). Who knows, obviously this is all speculation, but it's always quite interesting to ponder, and wonder what's next.
...Then again if you're a PC gamer, who the fuck cares? Upgrade to an i7, Xfire/SLI your cards, slot in some lovely DDR3, and water-cool that shit. You should then proceed to ignore anything said above, as you're already clearly technically ahead of this console shit.
[1] http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6128295/report-ps3-to-sell-for-399-cost-494-to-make
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starglider
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