The current generation of consoles have been out for nearly three years. The Xbox One launched on November 22nd 2013 and was bundled with Kinnect for $499 and the Playstation 4 was released on November 15th of the same year for $399. Both consoles have sold a very good amount in terms of sales, but the Playstation was selling out left and right. On launch day, if you didn’t preorder any console, it was nearly impossible to get one anywhere. I remember hearing about people having to drive in upwards of 50 miles to a store to get one, not even knowing if the one they called about would have been sold already when they got there.
The choices between the two consoles for many players fell under two categories: Friends and Software (games). The exclusives on both consoles are what drove the markets’ competition. Microsoft had Halo, Sony had Uncharted. Microsoft had Gears of War, Sony had God of War. All games are different in a sense that they attract different people, but the casual gamer is someone who doesn’t play on a regular basis and when they do, they play games like Madden, Fifa, and NBA 2K. The other class of gamer is the hardcore gamer, someone who dedicates hours of their time to one game, or even multiple games at one time. For the casual gamer, the choice of console came down to where their friends play, for the hardcore gamer, it came down too a few different things.
By comparison, the PS4 was indeed a stronger console. It had faster processing speed, and on first party games, the Playstation could run games at 1080p and 60 frames per second. These specs are important because of the way games run on your TV. Lets talk resolution first.
Resolution is how clear or blurry the game appears as it’s on the screen. An HD tv has 1080 pixels (p) and stretches the picture across the screen as the information is brought onto the screen. If the developer makes a game in 720p it means that the TV has to port the resolution up higher and “stretch” the information to make it look normal on the screen, this process is also known as 1080i. Resolution helps in the display and the presentation of a game while it is in still form, or while no actions are produced. Take a blade of grass in Madden, in the older games the grass looked like a big blob of green that the players floated across, but in recent years on the XBO and PS4, you can see blades of grass during cut scenes.
Frame rate is another issue with video games, the higher the frame rate, the clearer the action is during the game play. With lower frame rate, the game starts to “screen tear” and becomes blurry at some points during the play through. This frustrates us gamers because we could be missing something important, or something looks blurry when it shouldn’t. Problems with frame rate include bugs like falling through levels, or having faces skip across the screen, and even up to the game crashing back to the dashboard. Frame rate keeps the game running “smoothly,” without many issues.
Video games have come a long way since they first started. Games used to be something of a past time and gamers were considered to be “nerds,” more of a social outcast rather than something that is accepted in the mainstream media. Gaming has become more of a hobby rather than a pastime so to speak. As with every hobby, the costs start to pile up. With games now being $60, and some even being more with season passes, developers have over the top budgets for games that will sell. The consoles have dropped in price now that Project Scorpio for Microsoft and the Playstation Neo have been confirmed. But one thing hasn’t changed, the cost of a gaming PC. As technology advances, so does the cost of the hardware to run the developing games. Just to build a decent gaming PC from scratch you’re looking at spending around $1,200, keep in mind that is just the bare minimum to run games smoothly. But to look forward, we must also go back in time when video games started becoming mainstream.
The Xbox 360 and PS3 were the consoles of choice for nearly a decade. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 were comparably the same, but Sony goofed on the reveal and priced their console at $599 while the Xbox 360 had two models that started at $349 and went up from there. The original Xbox, referred to as the OG Xbox, was Microsofts’ first console from a company that was known for software rather than powerful hardware at the time. Sony had owned the market for the living room console, and was openly arrogant about it. The console war had begun.
Over time, the Playstation had come to earn it’s stripes and become a larger part of the scene, the Blu-ray drive was a plus for many gamers who wanted a blu-ray player at the time. While the Playstation was catching up. developers didn’t like developing games for the console. The processing drive was hard to optimize the games, and it was hard to get them perfected. Sony continued to ignore the developers requests for easier development, but the hardware sales weren’t effected by it.
Microsoft on the other had, made the Xbox 360 very easy to develop games for . Developers loved the freedom and the ease it was for optimizing the games for the console. Not only was it easy to develop for, Microsoft updated the dashboard multiple times in the span for the fist few years of launch. They listened to the fans and applied what they had learned on the OG Xbox and applied it to the Xbox 360.
Fastforward to E3 2016. Protect Scorpio was confirmed on stage at the Microsoft press conference by the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer. Microsoft has very high hopes for Project Scorpio, it’s said to have 6 teraflops of power, 3200 gb/s bandwidth memory, and true 4K gaming and video. Giving developers this kind of power has been unheard of in the console space, Microsoft is aiming to make Project Scorpio the most powerful console ever made. With all the power the Scorpio is said to have, developers have a tough choice to make.
As I said before, games have increasing budgets because of the technology that comes with the new consoles. Take a game like Grand Theft Auto V, critically acclaimed and welcomed by the consumers. It cost Rockstar around $266 million to develop, including marketing, keep in mind that was originally developed for the Xbox 360 at only 720p and 30 frames a second. Granted, Rockstar took their time making that game because of how perfect they wanted the game to be. In 2014 Ubisoft released watchdogs and it costs just under $70 million to develop, even then it had it’s issues. In a sense, even before a single game was sold at your local Best Buy or GameStop, these companies had a price tag combined for $336 million for development costs.
At what point do we start putting games on a budget? It’s nothing new that games are a very expensive hobby, but at what point are the prices going to be going up on games? Homefront was considered a flop because it cost $50 million and sold less than 400,000 copies in the United States, around a million worldwide. Homefront is also part of the reason THQ went out of business. Homefront was sold to the publisher Deep Silver and even then, the second game didn’t sell well either.
When developers are seeing how much money it costs to produce games for the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, will they be as willing to put money towards that after developing for Project Scorpio and Neo? Are we sure that publishers will want to fork out an extra at least $50 million to develop it for current consoles? The simple answer is no. If you can save money, yet charge more for a game because of the development costs why not? In this age where one game will be the difference between a company going under, and providing a paycheck to their employees, will they be as willing to produce product that adds to the overall costs?
The other side of the argument is what happened at the end of the last console cycle. Between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, there were over 150 million consoles worldwide. Both were extremely successful, but weren’t left behind for about a year after launch of the new consoles. The main issue is that games that are specifically developed for the specific consoles are expensive, time consuming, and nearly always have delays. Mostly, those games are meant to sell consoles (Titanfall).
Not only will the Scorpio and Neo be more powerful, but they will be expensive as well. Seeing as how a high end gaming PC is nearly $1,200, I don’t expect these consoles to be less than $500 at launch. Not only are these going to be expensive, but without a 4K TV, those features will be, for a lack of a better term, useless. The same way that trying to use your 480p TV with HD gaming, it won’t work. No matter how good the game looks when it’s being showed, it won’t be that clear without a 4K television. In essence, you as the gamer, have to make at least a $2,000 investment in a 4K TV, assuming you don’t have one, as well as the consoles for X amount of dollars. Phil Spencer even stated in a post E3 interview that if you don’t have a 4K television, you shouldn’t get a Scorpio.
In a sense, the Scorpio is alienating part of the gaming community.
It’s no secret that games will run better on the Neo and the Scorpio, but that’s the problem. I’m ok with the games running better on the consoles that I don’t have, because it’s my choice not to buy the new consoles at launch. With that being said, at what point do developers cut off ties with the Xbox One like they did with the 360 and PS3? At what point do they move on and you as the consumer, are forced to upgrade not only your 4 year old console, but your TV as well? If developers can say “my game runs much better on Scorpio than on the XBO, and I can do what I want on it more than I can on the XBO, why not just make it for Scorpio and Neo?” There in lies the problem with the Neo and Scorpio console.
Eventually, the mid-cycle consoles will take over the market and leave the lower powered consoles behind.
So in a senese to sum up my feelings on Scorpio and Neo, I am all for both consoles. I think 4K gaming is eventually going to happen, but why not wait another 2-4 years until the 4K TV is more mainstream and cheaper like it was for HD TV’s? Why not just call them the Xbox (Two) and Playstation (5)? One could argue that Microsoft had mid-cycle upgrades during the 360 era with the elite, but they didn’t change the hardware. They didn’t make that console more powerful or allow developers to make their games look better or operate better. I hope the Scorpio will be successful, and I also believe that 4K gaming is on the horizon, sooner than we think. But simply to make a more powerful console, in mid-cycle generation, when the cost to develop games is already as high as it is, equates to playing with fire.
In the end, these consoles are bound to happen, but is it too soon in the cycle to switch gears? Is progress for the sake of progress the right thing?
Are Neo and Scorpio too soon, or a product of technology advancement?
RSS