With the Xbox One Scorpio and the PS4 Pro, Microsoft and Sony are introducing a brand new paradigm to console gaming that has simply not existed so far. And yet, while this is something new for consoles, it is also something that is fairly commonplace for other consumer electronics- tablets, mobiles, and PCs, for instance, all see constant iteration and new products being released with routine regularity.
That said, even though these new systems might resemble the model used for smartphones or PC, Microsoft are not looking at importing that model to the console market wholesale. In an interview with TechRadar, Microsoft’s Albert Penello emphasized that the specific needs of the console market must be kept in mind as Microsoft move forward with this new paradigm.
“I hear people use the mobile phone analogy to sort of describe it and I think that I can understand why that makes sense,” he said. “People use the PC analogy and I think that makes sense. The challenge of course is whenever you say that you always go into the negatives, or you go into how that market – the mobile phone market – is different from consoles.
“Usage models are different, financing is different … I don’t think we want to get the expectation of, like, ‘every year there’s these very minor changes and we just inundate the market.’ We’ve gotta figure out how this makes sense for console gamers, and respect what makes console gaming great as we go through this transition.”
Hopefully, this means that products are allowed more breathing time than the average smartphone, which gets about a year on the market before its replacement is ready. 2-3 years before a more spruced up version of a console is released, on average, may just strike the perfect balance.
It’s an exciting new frontier- and it’ll be interesting to see what Sony and Microsoft do, and how customers respond to it.