AN EARLY REFRESH
Microsoft’s new Xbox One S launches this week, but with another upgrade coming next year, is it worth it?
For the video game business this year, Christmas starts now.
The holiday buying season has always been the equivalent of the summer months of movie blockbusters, with several big games coming out every week. But Microsoft kicked things off early this year by launching the Xbox One S console on Tuesday.
Nothing gets gamers more excited than new hardware, and Microsoft hopes that old Xbox 360 users will take this opportunity to upgrade. But the decision to do so isn’t as easy as usual, since all the major console players are planning to release more powerful versions or new devices in 2017.
Then there’s the fact that console life-cycles are getting shorter, for a number of reasons.
Smartphones and PCs are on much faster productupgrade cycles, letting them cash in on the growth in mobile gaming and virtual reality technology.
Non-gaming technology is also advancing more rapidly; console refreshes now need to take advantage of 4K TV, virtual reality and augmented realty.
The casual audience has moved on to mobile gaming on their smartphones, hugely cutting sales of dedicated mobile hardware such as Nintendo’s 3DS and the PlayStation Vita. Pokemon Go’s monstrous success is a perfect example of how the rules are changing: a standout hit on Nintendo’s platforms for a year, it became a worldwide phenomenon once it was released for smartphones.
Gamers tend to be early adopters, and are willing to pay more for the latest devices. Speeding the upgrade cycle means manufacturers can get more money from the same set of consumers more often, referred to in the business as increasing average revenue per user.
The Xbox One S is actually a product refresh; both Microsoft and Sony have done this in the past, updating some features while also producing the consoles with components that had dropped in price since the original roll-out. Hard drives, for example, get smaller, hold more and are less expensive every year.
Compared to the original Xbox One, the S model is 40-per-cent smaller and can support some 4K Ultra HD and is available in a $499 model with 2TB of storage.
But the real console-refresh wars may be down the road.
Scorpio, the code name for a console purportedly much more powerful than Xbox One, will be available next year. Also next year, Sony is due to launch the PlayStation Neo, a more powerful version of its PS4 console, while Nintendo will launch the NX, its follow-up to the disappointing Wii U.
“This is by far the most significant refresh of a console, mid-cycle, that’s happened since I’ve been covering gaming,” says Lewis Ward, research director, gaming, with research firm IDC, of the overall trend. “These really are to take advantage of 4K and VR technologies, which really didn’t even exist when they started planning the PS4 and Xbox One.”
Sony’s big holiday play is the PSVR, a virtual-reality headset that is likely pushing the computing capability of the PS4. Ward expects that the big addition to the Xbox Scorpio will be plug-and-play capability with several different VR and AR headsets.
While touting how much more powerful the new Scorpio is supposed to be when it launched at the annual gaming conference E3 in June, Xbox head Phil Spencer promised that “no gamer will be left behind,” obviously trying to assure gamers who have already bought an Xbox that they hadn’t made a mistake and that the new console will be backward-compatible with earlier versions of games.
This is the industry’s push-pull situation. The more powerful the new consoles are, the more developers will try to push the envelope on what they can do by creating graphically more impressive games. But they also don’t want to alienate the hardcore consumers who bought the first generation of a console, and who might find their machines can’t handle the new games.
The more frequent product-refresh cycle has heightened that tension.
The new consoles “cause some trepidation and confusion, in terms of people who have bought consoles in the past, and the developers, who take years to make games. You’ve always been able to plan for up to 10 years of a system being set in stone as it were and that’s changing,” says Ward. “But at the same time, you can’t raise the headroom on what these systems can do and not at least open the door for developers to take advantage of that.”
While there has been a lot of talk about the increased competition from other forms of gaming, Ward still says that consoles rule the living room gaming space and despite the fact that many have predicted the death of dedicated gaming hardware with every generation, there’s still life in them.
At the very least, next year’s models will allow the industry to hit reset one more time. What we know so far:
Xbox One S & Scorpio Microsoft is squarely second in this generation of consoles — Sony’s 40 million in PlayStation4 sales almost double Xbox One’s lifetime sales. The Xbox One S is a minor refresh, as it is smaller and has some 4K capabilities, such as support for movies, but not for games. Scorpio will reportedly have “6 Teraflops of computing power,” which is a lot, but not much more is known about the device.
Microsoft has been experimenting with HoloLens, its augmented-reality headset and the company has a business relationship with Oculus Rift, so support for those headsets seems likely. Microsoft’s strategy is to also to have games crossplay with Windows 10 devices. This could be laying the groundwork to consolidate its core gaming audience and its massive Windows customer base.
PlayStation Neo While the Sony’s PlayStation4 was a more powerful machine at the start of this console generation, it’s expected that Xbox’s Scorpio will be more powerful than Sony’s next device, the PlayStation Neo. The Neo is expected to have native 4K ultra high-definition gaming, and it will likely have more power for PlayStation virtual-reality games.
Some leaks suggest the Neo will have a higher clock speed of 2.1Ghz compared to the current 1.6 Ghz, double the computing units, an improved graphics-processing unit and faster memory. Sony plans that upcoming games will have “base” and “Neo” modes, with additional features that are activated when used in the new console.
Neo’s release date is unknown, but many have speculated that it will come out before Project Scorpio, potentially in the first half of next year. First-mover advantage has often been important for the company that wants to win a console generation.
Nintendo NX Nintendo’s next console is due next year. Before last week, what was known was that the company is betting a lot on the next Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which will work on the previous-generation Wii U as well as the NX. Several reports have said the console will have a home docking station, but will also have a portable aspect so gamers can take it on the go.
It will reportedly use Nvidia processors, which will hopefully help the company catch in terms of power.
But once again, it looks like Nintendo is going down its own path, creating another device that is not well-supported by third-party developers. That is one of the big reasons for the failure of the Wii. As seen by the success of Pokemon Go, there is an appetite for Nintendo properties on other platforms, but the company seems to want to keep its core games and players on its own hardware.