[6ren]

I'm seeing a pattern, a cycle between hubris and humility.

When Nintendo ruled, Sony broke in by courting game developers. Then, they became arrogant, and made the best hardware they could, they was difficult to use. Thus, Microsoft won, simply because it was easier for developers. It was then amazing to see how arrogant they had become with the xboxone trying to squeeze everyone, in every way - similar to how they removed the ability to cancel xbox live online.

What Microsoft didn't realize is that they didn't win - Sony lost, by shooting themselves in the foot. But in this generation, if PS4 is easy to develop for, cheaper, more powerful, and not trying to squeeze every cent and control every aspect... things will be different.

Of course, Microsoft will see their mistake and adjust (as they've done many times). But while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. Also, next year, mobile devices should reach GPU parity with last gen consoles... and with their faster iteration cycle, match PS4/xboxone three years after that. (unlike CPUs, GPUs scale really well).

[cromwellian]

I highly doubt that assertion, it's a handwavy extrapolation. The current GPUs have significantly higher TDP, 3 years ago, state of the art GPUs had 3 Billion transistors and power consumption over 150W.

The Playstation 3 is based on 2004 era (cut down G70 )chip designs, so you're talking mobile devices next year catching up with a chip that's almost ten years ago, based on a 90nm processor node. Today's PS4 will be based on a 28nm node, there's no way in 3 years you're going to shrink the PS4 GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 to fit into an iPhone like device and not heat up like a welding torch and drain the battery like a blackhole.

It's a common, but incorrect assertion that mobile devices are going to replace game consoles. It might replace them for casual gamers, but not hard-core gamers. I don't know anyone who wants to play CoD or Half Life 2 on a mobile device. They want to play them on a high end PC, console, or SteamBox.

[lelandbatey]

Every single time I see someone say "Things in the future aren't going to see huge performance increases like that." I smile, because the beauty of the future is that we don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe in ten years we'll all have crazy brain implants made possible by some new awesome technology, and we'll be watching pinar movies as these devices render them in real time.

Probably not likely, but I'm not going to make any absolute claims about anything.

[RogerL]

To be fair, the person made no assertions, they said "I highly doubt", and couched other limits in terms of thermodynamics. I'm pretty comfortable saying that thermodynamics is not going to change in a year; at least as comfortable as saying that the sun will rise in the East next year.

More importantly to my way of thinking, the parent to both your posts is talking about company strategy. You have to base future strategy on reasonable projections. Some projections are more likely than other, and you have an n-dimensional space of Gaussian and non-Gaussian probability distributions to optimize. Fortunately, most of the likely scenarios lie near a low dimensional manifold, and we can thus say things like a cell phone won't perform like today's Kepler without running at 200C (because thermodynamics). On a website we can smile knowingly and speculate about possible futures, but company directors need to be far more prosaic and pragmatic.

[johnchristopher]

That "we can't know anything about the future" attitude is way more absolute than what the parent is saying and it doesn't foster any interesting conversations about what could happen, why, how, when and how that could relates to our present and past.

[Keyframe]

I get what you're saying, but Microsoft never won any console race http://www.geekwire.com/2013/xbox-360-wii-ps3-won-console-ge...

[InclinedPlane]

Naive interpretations of the current console generation will lead to incorrect conclusions.

Microsoft unequivocally won the 360/ps3/wii console generation. Not because they shipped more consoles, no console maker actually makes the majority of their profit from raw console shipments, it's a very misleading figure. What matters more are sales of games and DLC and subscriptions to services. In those measures the 360 has been trouncing every other console maker. People who own 360s spend more time playing the console, they spend more money buying physical games, and they spend more money buying DLC and subscribing to xbox live gold. Microsoft does more business on higher margin items than other console makers.

The Wii made ok money for Nintendo but the sales dropped off really fast, and people didn't end up playing it much, or buying many games for it. The PS3 took a long time to reach a state of maturity where there was a sufficient stock of good games on the console to actually justify owning one. And eventually the PS3 managed to get to a state where it was actually doing well. But from a business perspective no matter how much better it was doing the 360 continued to outpace it (in game sales especially). These are some of the major reasons why there even is a new console generation this year, Nintendo and Sony need to put themselves on a new footing in order to have a chance of growing their market share.

[pandaman]

Why sales matter and not profits? If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state.

Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even. They had shown some minor profit on their entertainment divisions in some quarters but the RROD alone costs them $1B not counting minor stuff like purchasing and running Rare or paying for "exclusivity".

[InclinedPlane]

If profit figures were available we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the answer would be obvious. But they're not. Nintendo's figures are the most available (since gaming is the majority of their business and they are a public company), but the least relevant because we know they've been struggling. Sony has had reduced profitability and losses over the last few years. The interesting thing is how difficult it is to get numbers out of Microsoft. They fold the Xbox and console gaming part of the company in with web-based gaming and the windows phone (and formerly zune) part of the company, which muddies the waters considerably. Overall though there are many indications that console gaming has been profitable for Microsoft. For example, in 2012 alone xbox live made $1.2 billion in revenue. This is a very high-margin business for MS and that represents about 10% of the entire worldwide video game revenue.

MS has dumped a lot of money into console gaming, but they've built a business that is now generating a lot of revenue in a lot of high margin areas.

[pandaman]

I think your numbers are way off, the entire worldwide video game revenue is not anywhere around $12B[1]

Also margins are not as high as you seem to imagine, look at any 3d party publisher reports (they are all public corps).

[1] http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/06/10/gameshow-e-idINDEE9...

[Keyframe]

If it's such a successful business for Microsoft, how come potential next CEO of Microsoft is thinking of ditching that business to someone else? Is he insane or that business is a burden to Microsoft?

[abarringer]

From the original article.

"When the PS3 launched, according to most estimates, Sony controlled about 70 percent of the console market. Seven years later, it’s on even terms with Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the U.S. for 32 consecutive months."

Going from 70% to "even" with Microsoft seems like a non-win?

[sillysaurus2]

That graph is incredible. I had no idea holidays mattered so much. They may as well be the reason the industry exists.

[sliverstorm]

First I will note that Sony hardware has reputedly never been easy to develop for, so the PS3 wasn't anything new there.

Second, you state while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. We still don't know how the dice will land in this regard. Microsoft managed higher-than-expected frequency yield, and nobody knows where Sony's chip sits. It also remains to be seen how the SRAM vs GDDR5 plays out.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

It was a different world then, but the original PSX was pretty straightforward. A commodity MIPS processor, relatively straightforward vector and image co-processors. In particular Sony made a bet that ram prices would fall enough to make the console profitable long term and that bet payed out. To remember how much things have changed, the CDROM format was controversial then, but was a huge win for developers.

Bluntly, Sony got it right with the PSX in making it very approachable for developers. They messed that up with PS2 and they should have learned that then. Instead they doubled down on the same misguided approach with the PS3 to predictable results. I'm glad to see they're not going to make the same mistake again.

Source: I was a subcontractor on a PSX title years ago.

[pandaman]

And PS2 is officially the best selling console in the world [1]. But I agree - other than PS1 (which was easier than Saturn), Sony hardware was never easier than competition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...

[lucian1900]

There is no debate about the hardware, really. The PS4 is the more powerful console in every single way.

What makes the Xbox One hardware interesting is the Kinect.

[sliverstorm]

How so? I thought on specs they pretty much trade evenly blow-for-blow, aside from Sony's unknown chip frequency and the GDDR5 vs eSRAM?

[lucian1900]

The PS4's GPU is somewhat more powerful (in absolute terms) and the Xbox One's eSRAM isn't much to small to make up for the really slow DDR3 (it can barely hold one frame, I believe).

[kayoone]

The notion that mobile GPUs will soon overtake console GPUs is nonsense, yet i hear it over and over since the iPad2 days. Even the latest iPad Air is still quite far off a Xbox360, they might catch up during the next 2 years but then we have a completely new console generation anyway.

If mobile GPUs will reach a point where they are good enough, thats an entirely different story, but that still leaves you with subpar controls and very casual games.

I also dont think it matters much if the XBox One is a tiny bit slower than the PS4, console exclusive titles will get even more rare in the future and the difference in visual quality between the due is negligible, as in hardly to be seen by the human eye.

[lucian1900]

They're more "different" than "weak" nowadays. Most tablets have way more memory and much better SIMD than a 360, with a (now) similarly powerful GPU, but with much lower bandwidth. While the end results don't look as good as on a 360 overall, some aspects do indeed look better.

The one huge difference is the input method, which will always hold tablets back.

[kayoone]

Thats true but my fact still stands that in terms of raw processing power for games they are still far off. I believe a Xbox360 manages around 10 GTexels/sec while the ipad Air is around 3 GTexels/sec. For comparision a modern desktop GPU is at about 50-80 GT/s which is where the new console generation is at as well.

Same story for GFlops and most other relevant metrics..

[lucian1900]

But the tablets have much higher resolution and often no aliasing. It's not quite so clear-cut when comparing only the end-result.