Annoyed at the ''New Console'' rumors

Well, that's a bit misguided. The first Xbox was released in 2001-2002 the Xbox 360 was released in 2005. Waiting too long to release a new generation will definitely cost you market share (something Apple knows only too well, taking advantage of Microsoft's inability to go past Windows XP and grabbing a steady market share starting around 2005).

The 'backward compatibility' problem is a real one, and crucial for next-gen war. If my gigantic collection of PS3/Xbox360 game is actually compatible with next-gen, it will give me a huge incentive to upgrade. On the other hand, if it means I'm throwing away all my existing games, then ... ouch!

Take DVD movies for instance. If Blu-ray players did not read your DVDs, would you buy one?

Finally, as for the fans pressure demanding new generation of consoles. This is not something to be annoyed at. On the contrary, it shows a public desire to go past what we have today. However, next-gen might not be what you expect.

I don't have time to look for the many links to back my claims up (Google would do that for you), but it's a recurrent fact that companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are losing in the gaming area to "dumber" devices like Android or iOS. Despite what "hardcore" gamers think or would prefer, the new mobile platforms (running on phones and tablets, especially tablets) are much more attractive and profitable. Google and Apple are becoming the next great names in video game. (That's not me talking, that's the market. Personally, I'm a "real men" console fan. The market says otherwise).

So now the big guys (Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft) face a dilemma: should they hop on the new mobile/stupid fun/dumb-addictive games when the market clearly demands it? They will lose the core of their die-hard fan base. On the other hand, if they keep ignoring this, there's a high risk that they will end up catering for a small niche market, with most innovations happening on your handheld.

(For the record, Nintendo realized this way before anyone else when they released the Wii. Competition was focusing on raw processing power and they focused on gameplay-fun. The Wii is far less impressive than the PS3, but much more of a commercial success).

My prediction is that Sony/Microsoft will react to this. Like you said, current gen still looks very good. The improvements will be on:
- Mobility
- Online playing

When the current gen was released, all consoles were online capable. Yet, they were still traditional consoles focused on single player gaming. Today the gaming landscape is very different from 2005. Almost all gaming happens online. And, whether we like it or not, it happens on your phone.

Let's wait and see...

Kadouh, I think you're missing their purpose. People who post such false advertisement are usually people who look up popular search terms and act based on those. In other sites, you would find rumor ads for an iPhone 5. Get the point? They just want to make money by exploiting people's search terms and luring them into clicking.

Kadouh wroteEvery time i go to ign,gametrailers and gamespot i see trash like ''NEW PS4 SPECS'' and ''XBOX720 BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE!''. I am sick and tired of this bullcrap, these stories have been raging on for 2 years but they exploded ever since nintendo announced WII U. Fanboys dont understand that the so called ''INFORMATION OF PS4 AND XBOX720'' are just some stupid rumors.Why can't people just wait for a game company to announce their new console instead of fans speculating about it. Question is: Do you think that all these rumors will make SONY and Microsoft work harder for their new gaming console? Personally i think that releasing a new console now or next year wouldn't make sense since current gen games are still looking good and handling well.

how should big sites like ign and gamespot with hundreds of staff memebers keep the gaming audience entertained in the off season?
By launching rumors and discussing the upcoming tech.
So it seems very odd of you to question that behavior since you are one of their visitors.

rahmu wroteI don't have time to look for the many links to back my claims up (Google would do that for you), but it's a recurrent fact that companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are losing in the gaming area to "dumber" devices like Android or iOS. Despite what "hardcore" gamers think or would prefer, the new mobile platforms (running on phones and tablets, especially tablets) are much more attractive and profitable. Google and Apple are becoming the next great names in video game. (That's not me talking, that's the market. Personally, I'm a "real men" console fan. The market says otherwise).

Losing in the gaming area ? That's a wrong way to put it, they are losing some market share yes that's granted but they still dominate gaming revenues check the numbers. Although one could argue that the future looks uncertain (although again i don't agree) for now the huge gaming revenue is still found within the console market.

Very good article on the future of ps4 - built on x86 platform

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals-a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry.ars

@dp0001: No offense, but this is a terrible article.

Everything in there is about raising both gamer's expectations and pressure on companies to release something. A lot of self-proclaimed speculation (ok not exactly a speculation. ArsTechnica cites Kotaku that cites "reliable sources" that PS3 might be named "Orbis" and might run on a 64-bit CPU). Even if that was actually true, what do gamers care about if you're running on a x86_64 architecture or a 128-bit PowerPC? By the author's own account, it doesn't even permit to estimate the processing power of the machine. So you're basically making assumptions about facts that are, per your admission, irrelevant. It doesn't make you smarter to know bogus technical details. It just makes you pedantic and pretentious.

Also, and this is something I noticed sports journalists do a lot, I love when they make a speculation ("Xbox and PS3 might get their chips from AMD") and then go on lengthy pointless analysis on what it means for AMD, and how AMD is crushing NVIDIA (wait I didn't know Nvidia made CPU!) and more importantly ... It's just a fucking rumor!. That's like me speculating that I will be more succesful than you, than making fun of you for being a failure!

Also I love how the author never wants to assert anything. Take this sentence for instance:

It's easy to envisage a custom-produced design that combines perhaps 2 or 4 CPU Bulldozer or Bobcat threads and a Southern Islands GPU [...] with, for example, a high-speed memory unit, or a dedicated vector processing unit similar to those found in the Cell processor.

For the love of God, say something useful already! It's cute that you enjoy fantasizing about how you can combine all the existing chips on the market. But how is that intersting reading?

This is exactly the kind of articles @kadouh was talking about. Stupid baseless rumors, and an arrogant tone in throwing bogus numbers and specs and nonsense "analysis" of the industry. I am not saying all game journalists suck, far from it. But this, ... this is fundamentally wrong. I feel stupider for having read it.

You said the F word :P.

On topic, today there is a rumor about the xbox having 16 core-ed cpu... Thats right 16 cores packed in a small plastic box with little cooling and a small psu.

Its rumors thats all what it is, running amds apu and 7670 gpu is great, cool and whats not. Bu think about the stutter, the lack of proper scaling and all xfire issues. Microsoft is not dumb to do such a configuration. These are rumors marketed by microsoft and sony themselves to make you, the customer waiting for a new gen consol, not to buy the Wii U. As the wii now has a great lead when it comes to releasing the actual hardware. Wii U has a lot of ground to cover, but it is the 1st new gen consol released. THAT alone will impact the market and make everyone buy it.

Not to mention that used games will be no more playable...And that is not a rumor.

rahmu wrote- According to the links you have provided, "smartphone games" are showing the biggest growth rate in the industry, almost ousting Nintendo and Sony off the handheld market. Don't look at a snapshot in time (2011 results), rather look at a trend. It'd be easy to make a nice flowchart with colors and 3d effects to show how quickly they are taking over the market.

Naturally it's a new market and growth is happening at a faster pace than an already established market ... that's elementary i'm not arguing about this part, in a few years time the growth is gonna slow down and i believe that consoles and pc would still hold the larger share of the market.

rahmu wrote- Comparing revenues is fundamentally flawed. The average Android and iOS game costs about $2.50. New PS3 games sell well over $40. I'm being generous, PS3 games cost beyond 60euros at my local resellers. Most Android games are downloaded for free, pending advertisement hammering. The ads revenues aren't counted in the study you mention. Bottom line, even considering a 20to1 ratio on the price, Smartphone game has the same volume, as an industry, as console+PC gaming.

True, profits would be a better comparison but i wasn't able to secure accurate numbers

rahmu wroteOn the other hand, it's true that I worded my argument poorly when I said console gaming is "losing" to the smartphone platform. But there's no denying that they are shaken by the phenomenon, and if they ignore the trend, there's a very real danger they might be on their way out.

I agree with this statement it's what i was arguing about, but it seems we're on the same page

@mezin:

Naturally it's a new market and growth is happening at a faster pace than an already established market ...

Wrong! Handheld video games is a market older than me and you. According to the Wikipedia entry, "Handheld video games grew immensely in popularity, thanks to the Game Boy released in 1989." But the article traces the history back to the 1970s.

Smartphones and tablets are invading a territory dominated by Nintendo for over 20 years. This is why the trend is scary. (but again, numbers don't mean anything remember?)

profits would be a better comparison

No no and no!! Nothing is a better comparison. Numbers give you ideas, they don't give facts. Take this for instance:

- What do you mean by profit? Is it the profit made by the console maker? The game designer? The manufacturer? The game distributor? The retailer? Each node of the supply chain is taking a share of the profit. Which one are you talking about? I can focus at any level I want and make numbers say whatever I want.

Android/iOS games have a different distribution/publishing system. Give your game to the App Store manager, he'll give you your cut at the end of the month. Even in such a simplistic system, the definition of the word "profit" can mean whatever I want it to mean.

Finally, again $2.5 games vs $40+ games. The issue is about comparing absolute values, when you should probably be comparing percentages. (and by now you made the numbers dancing so hard, you can probably prove that Nintendo is a scam perpetuated by governments to cover the fact that they never went to the moon).

Ultimately, we agree on the position of smartphone games as a threat to gaming, but I wanted the tangent point (numbers don't mean jack) to really stand out.

@dp0001:
So basically the point of the article is: Sony and Microsoft will probably put cheaper hardware in their consoles to remain competitive. Everyone will be happy except us, the gamers.

Fundamentally misguided. It's making 2 baseless assumptions:

- 64 bit systems are cheaper to manufacture than 128 bit ones.
- 64 bit systems are less performant than 128 bit ones.

For the first part, a chip is a chip. In my humble opinion (I'm no supply chain expert), the main factor influencing cost would be experience in manufacturing (in 2005-6, few comapnies really knew how to manufactor 128bit systems but 64-bit were far more common). By now this should not be an issue anymore.

Yes lower specs will cut costs. But this speculation is simply derived from the fact that they "might" be moving from 128bit to 64bit?! There's a plethora of components involved in the making of a gaming console. Literally more than I could count here. The article gives one particular spec (memory space adressing, so random) and came up with the bogus conclusion.

Also, second false assumption: 128bit platforms are more performant that 64bit platforms. This is madness. The truth is: "With all other factors being absolutely equal, a game optimized for 128bit might achieve faster processing of certain aspect of the game than what we know on the 64bit". But that's very nuanced and specific. Just saying 128bit is "faster" or "more powerful" than 64 bit is absolutely crazy. Thousands of factors are into play when talking about gaming performance, from hardware, to software, to networking, to displays, I could go on... Memory adress space is, once again, just one random factor; it just so happens that bad journalists and marketing people love to talk about it. Then draw their stupid ass conclusions.

What I'm trying to say is that the article is baseless. It makes one assumption (next gen will backport from 128bit architecture to 64bit architecture), and let me stress on this: it's just a rumor; and then go on lengthy bogus and fundamentally twisted analysis. Fanboys salivate at all the numbers and "deep" anaylsis they get. Magazine makes money. Everyone's happy.

One last thing: I salute the fact that you provided a very recent link to Sony's current state of finances. Of course, a couple of things to note:

- Bad end of year result aren't necessarily a sign of bad health for a company. If you've taken an accounting class before, you know what I mean.
- The numbers (oh I love showing numbers) are once again misleading. The state of finances of Sony Group aren't directly affecting the gaming division. As a matter of fact, the article blames TV divison for the massive losses, and here's another article that depicts the Gaming division as the "key [to Sony's] reboud". Correlating the fact that Sony is losing money on the TV market, and that they will produce cheaper consoles even if it annoys gamers is sneakily evil.

This is becoming an interesting thread. I would like to continue such discussions in real life (IRL?!) but i will try to toss some coins here.

In the beginning we should start from the current generation. The first thing many websites (if not the corporations themselves) highlighted was the hardware, graphics..etc. From previous generations of game consoles the current generation's hardware has grown in complexity exponentially. This created questions for gamers, if there is a relation between the hardware capabilities (theoretical) and the games released on that console.
This is an "issue" being circulated on the internet, on gaming website as an exploit in the gamer's mind. So basically a gamer starts searching for...PS4 for example by looking for the hardware (!). You know the rest i guess, a website tags AMD, NVIDIA, Sony...etc and that "poor" gamer gets directed toward that site which is littered with seemingly rumors from "inside" of Microsoft and Sony.


A simple story being written by gaming websites since 2005.......

All i know is that E3 2012 is just around the corner, and if you see any links such as "LEAKED INFO" within 5 days of the conference then you can might as well confirm its real

Last year the Microsoft surprise of the "slim" 360 was leaked a couple days early, and low and behold, it was revealed at E3.

So yeah, just wait for E3.