Job posting sheds light on Microsoft plan
Microsoft is at the very early stages in building the successor to the Xbox 360, new data shows.
The platform owner has advertised new job vacancies such as Graphics Hardware Architect and Performance Engineer for the Xbox Console Architecture Group.
Microsoft’s new hires will be “responsible for defining and delivering next generation console architectures from conception through implementation,” the company said.
The language of the job vacancies suggests a reveal for the console is years away – possibly set for retail in 2013 and revealed at E3 2012.
The original Xbox was built in 24 months. The successor, the Xbox 360, was built in around the same time.
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... a shift back to a traditional "games console", instead of this "online reliant, multimedia polluted, patch encouraging" platform we have today. It's all getting too PC like, and the beauty of consoles, was their complete difference to PCs.
Consoles = games, PC = multimedia and games.
It might stop the embarassing attitude of PC "gamers" (term used loosely) trying to blame consoles all the time. They might start considering the lazy "upgrade reliant" devs, and 10 year old PC hardware as the PC's problem.
I still personally believe, that the underlying economic climate, warrants the consideration of a unified (and compatible) platform. The argument "hardware competition breeds innovation" is rendered completely redundant, if we believe the PC is the (alleged) platform of innovation. We don't see AMD vs Intel causing great leaps in chip specific innovation.
One platform + many talented devs = mass market availability. Pool the hardware, pool the dev resources, adopt the same principle as every other entertainment media, and let the quality of the game speak for itself.
Every DVD, plays on every DVD player. Every CD, plays on every CD player. Isn't it about time the games industry matured, instead of the petty "my console's better than yours" fights, segmenting the target audience? How many more sales would a universal platform have generated for GT5, or Gears? How much less hassle would it be to not have to "port" titles, to essentially equal powered hardware? It's wasteful of resources, it's wasteful of time, and it's suicidal from a business perspective. 2 dev teams, one game... defies logic.
When I mentioned AMD vs Intel, I meant innovation in regards to games and software, not chip ability.
Its going to be very difficult to attract major developers to a new platform, with the spiraling cost of development it would be unprofitable to release a game on the scale of Call of Duty onto a new box. Even if you had a 50% buy rate you would still struggle to get those units you need. Not to mention their is no attraction of the possaility of selling 20 million copies when they arn't even 20 million consoles out their.
Its a difficult climate and one developers, publishers and manifacturers have pushed themselves towards. As much as I love the idea of a new console. Its going to need some great minds to not effect the industry in a bad way, at least in the short term. Which can easily close studios.
I am a believer that hardware competition breeds innovation, but even if I didn't, I think there's more to console diversity than just innovation.
Considering the publishers and console manufacturers are money-snatching scumbags that will close down entire chains of studios if it impressed stakeholders, I would not be happy to see one company dictate terms of game development with one console.
The DVD, VHS and CD analogies over the years have always been moot. Those devices are, essentially, open platforms - you build a DVD and it will play.
A tacky DVD full of illegal promiscuity will work as well as a Pixar flick.
A unified console will still have all the licensee and online store presence bullshit - you would still have to keep the hardware owners happy. And the more power hardware owners have, the worse it is for game development.
(Just before I start, being a PC gamer, it is a struggle not to just blame consoles for the current climate your right Lee, but there are a series of items in your argument that I will try and avoid as it will simply start a flame-war. Give us a bit of credit, PC "gamer" is just an attack term, it isn't necessary, particularly when a great deal of us aren't tools and are aware of the medium we use)
Difficult, so very difficult to either agree or disagree with you both. True a universal medium for consoles would probably provided the benefits of no more poorly-adapted ports between platforms and I agree that over the years the console has begun encroaching upon the PC space (far more devs are building for the console and porting to PC when it used to be reversed). But as Liamm stated, competition between the platforms does indeed force innovation and creativity - look at the Wii for example, that came out of no-where and Microsoft and Sony soon followed the idea..for better or worse.
It's never a good idea for a sole company to hold a monopoly over a product, things become stale and unchanging then, why fix what isn't broken right? But at the same time, having 3 different pieces of hardware in order to simply entertain yourself is fairly ludicrous logically.
What we need is a combination of both, for example as Liamm said in his argument "Those devices are, essentially, open platforms - you build a DVD and it will play." But are the devices not created by different companies?
What is to say we can't have a Universal Media for games, that every platform can play, but each platform can be unique in some way? I suppose what I'm saying is this: Why is it that you can play a PS disk in a Sony device, but not in a Microsoft device? Why does the encoding HAVE to be different? Short answer: It doesn't. But as companies are so firmly rooted in their respective places, we won't be seeing any changes anytime soon.
