Next Xbox Upgradable?

Meg has nice crits.

This leaves me in a weird spot as a gamer. I think that yes it's a great move as it's already heading that way and will be the standard eventually as that's what's great about the PC market. Instead of creating a bottleneck, they can have an upgrade wave every 3 years or so. This will allow for them to manage the pricing and keeping it simple for those that want to keep up. However it'll push a fair number of casual gamers who want a simple one off purchase machine that will provide them a platform to play games for a few years without additional cost. Perhaps if the consoles enter the pricing level for games on PC which is traditionally far cheaper on average and can bridge that gap enough to retain the consoles already large established market.

The downside will be that Microsoft will only be doing this for one console. It's not very likely that Playstation will be in the same place as Microsoft is due to not being WIndows driven. Sony are not going to benefit from this in the same way as MIcrosoft. Ditto the PC market itself may benifit a little from having consoles work on the same OS, but as some of the early issues with Windows 10 has signified that Microsofts push to one direction of development to work under Windows Universal Platform can also backfire. Yes it can give developers a much simpler development framework having just one OS to develop for in the grand view. However in it's current form is actually creating another OS standard ontop of the current Windows OS, Mac OS and Linux based systems and making more work for the games being made now. Perhaps they will create an OS that is far more development friendly and in turn speeding up and simplifying the entire thing making one central OS that only requires output specific development and game play tweeks to make up for a controllers lack of functionality (aim assist for example).

This move is a large step foward for consoles. But Microsoft has to ensure Sony and Nintendo do this as well if they are competing with them. They do not want to be the more expensive console on the market with varying hardware and games library. No-one will pay more for a console to play a limited number of games or pay more to be able to play the entire library of games. The argument works on PC as the platform will always benifit from upgrading hardware and can easily justify it in the long term. A console with a first gen hardware that will become unsellable once it upgrades is going to be a hard sale for traditional retailers. Ditto an upgrade and console bundle that makes it far more expensive again will price it out of the market. If they manage to do this right and sell well, they can make a good amount of money from this. But equally if they are branching out and in turn break their link to the console market it could be a gigantic falure that will shift them right out of the console market that they have worked so hard to be a part of.

So Xbox is trying to kill steam? I don't know how to feel about this? will I have to buy all my steam games again on the Xbox market place if they do kill steam? If they do start to kill steam off will we get Half-Life 3?

TLDR; Microsoft good at general computing machines... should stick to that and get people in to do the other stuff and leave them to it to do it well by providing lots of money to help them break into the market (like they did with XBox).

This just proves once again that the US doesn't really understand the Asian market or the non-core gamer market in the EU. Sony understands Asia (hence the huge success and failure when it tried to emulate the Western emphasis on technical supremacy). Nintendo understands the non-core console gamer market... hence the success of the Wii... but fails to understand that that market still isn't interested in mobile that only does games (why would it, it's got a mobile gaming platform in it's pocket all the time and doesn't want a dedicated gaming device because they are not dedicated gamers...) hence the failure of the Wii U (at least based on what I've seen of their advertising for it - but then that is the reality for non-core market in gaming). Their success of the 3DS is based on the success of the DS and it's backward compatibility with huge numbers of language learning games, mental training games, recipe books and a million other utility programs before app stores were really big... release the DS now and I'd be very surprised if it did anything like as well, even in Asia.

What Microsoft is trying to do is to unify everything they make into one cheaper to built for platform. It won't work because they are trying to build a general computing platform (for where they make most of their money - business) and tie in specialist devices; mobile and gaming... one of which has messed badly with the UI the general computing platform has (so they have an internal switch to make it go back to something that office bosses are happy with) and the other with has donated their closed eco-system ethos (DRM, locked to single systems/users, digital non-sharable non-sellable licenses etc.) which the office bosses don't care about because they've been price gauged for years and had to pay per machine brand new for as long as enterprise software was a thing.

The problem for Microsoft is that Apples mobiles are better at being mobiles, Google's Android platform is better at being a cross platform app store, Sony's "niche" gaming consoles are better at providing good reliable gameplay (this generation), Nintendo's image is better at attracting non-core gamers and family orietated business and customers and everyone else's VR is more exciting than their's (with the exception of Minecraft; but if it's years before Hololens happens in the consumer space then maybe it won't matter any more?)

What the market tells us is that people don't care if mobiles are closed systems if they are dominant, but an open mobile system can claim share if it can be cheap (which it often is because it doesn't all depend on one company doing the whole thing). Google's platform is better because open platforms allow people to adopt it easily and if it's cheap then that's even better (and since the programmers are cheaper then it often is)... that's why in the local department store I can buy a dozen competing brands of Android mobile, e-reader, tablet or TV and also a couple of laptops. Sony (and Microsoft) has showed over the last two generations that cheap hardware that's easier to code for works better in the console gaming market - Nintendo showed it too in a way since the Wii was dirt cheap (even if it wasn't so easy to code for, with one thing and another)! Nintendo has showed that the only way to keep a good image is to be insanely controlling over your IP, to the point that the majority of people won't work with you unless they really want or need to be in the same space (Family/non-core Gamers). VR is better than AR because you can completely change the world (because this one sucks)... ironically if Microsoft get Hololens out to the office environment they will make such a killing that handing the console market to Sony won't matter... that and they could potentially destroy millions of office jobs world-wide... but, capitalism, am-I-right? ;)

What Microsoft is good at is office general computing machines. Though more by dint of fighting themselves into being a monopoly (officially in the EU at least) and then keeping the opposition down. Mac is still niche in the personal computer sphere (a very trendy/pretty niche but a niche never-the-less - just check out the Steam stats). Linux is very big in everything where a technical person is involved and they need something about the size and power of a personal computer (or are willing to deal with clustering them *ahem*Google*ahem*).

So, MS, stick to general computing and get in or just rent out others who know their business better than you to do the other stuff... because all of that stuff will need the stuff you make to do their stuff anyway. If anything Microsoft needs to spend more time on general computing anyway since they still don't have anything like the penetration into the server market they should... every boss loves MS but very few big businesses use Microsoft for their big iron work horse computing! That's still IBM, Oracle, *nix and the like still chugging along like they have for decades...

Sorry. It got out of hand but it seems on-topic enough so here you are :)

Night, night :P

So I can't speak for anyone else. But I use my PC as my TV, Console and everything else. If I want to sit on my couch, I just connect the PC via HDMI and use a controller. If they want to make consoles upgradable and more like a PC, why shouldn't I keep using my PC? Some people don't have the PC to handle games and like to use a console, but this is kinda canceled out when the console basically is a PC on my TV. I don't know. Maybe people should just use whatever works for their setup. Is that crazy?

upgradable consoles will be good if its basically a PC and the base entry price for the console/PC (because it is/will be) can run everything that will come out/is coming out at decent settings but if you want those +60fps and +1080p, you would buy upgrades, then when a new "console" comes out its really just a big upgrade software and hardware wise to be able to get base/decent settings with the games coming out/will come out, then the process repeats, you get the upgradability and freedom of a PC and/or the simplicity and cheapness (kind of?) of a console.

So is this Microsoft admitting PC Master Race?

What does Apple have to do with upgradable hardware? "i devices" are exactly like gaming consoles in that you have to throw them away every so many years and is on a closed platform.

I think this may just work, you could simply have a banner on game cases, like the Kinect one, telling which upgrade is required. Also, if they use only certain upgrades released every two years, they could be labeled as upgrade x3. It could save on console costs.

If it means i can play Xbox exclusives on pc im all for it.

I hope it's called the Xbox Infinite