The game press is bu ing with reports that major studios are on track to receive next-generation development kits from Microsoft by the end of the year. There are rumors that Microsoft will demo the Xbox Next/720/Rutabaga (pick your favorite code word) at CES, with a launch possible as early as next year. One unnamed studio is reportedly already focusing on PS4 games. Are new consoles right around the corner?
Probably not — and for good reasons.
Much has been made of the fact that Nintendo is launching a new Wii in 2012. The particulars of that announcement may have been news to Sony and Microsoft, but it was obvious from launch day that the original Wii might not have the staying power of the Xbox 360 or the PS3. The Wii U should at least match its competitors, if not outperform them — but it’s not going to fundamentally blow them out of the water in the eye candy department.
Waiting for the Wii U gives both MS and Sony the opportunity to evaluate whether or not consumers latch on to Nintendo’s touch-enabled controller the way they leapt for motion control back in 2006. Kinect and PlayStation Move have been huge successes in their own right, but that doesn’t change the fact that Nintendo walt ed in to 2006 with a gaming strategy the other two powerhouses dismissed, then blew both of them away in terms of unit sales, profit margins, and general uptake. Where Sony and Microsoft slugged it out over an existing market, Nintendo sold consoles to people who had never bought one before.
Second, there are serious questions as to whether the Xbox 360 and PS3 launch strategies are worth repeating. Both companies lost money on every console for years after their debut, and both struggled with manufacturing issues. Microsoft’s Red Ring of Death needs no further discussion, but Sony had trouble mass-producing Blu-ray drives and was forced to ship the PS3 with just seven SPE’s rather than the intended eight in order to improve CPU yields. The Wii may have run out of steam before its counterparts, but Nintendo made money from day one.
Technology has certainly advanced enough to make a true next-generation console possible — but only if MS and Sony are willing to launch a fresh round of consoles at $499 and up. Waiting another 12-18 months to launch a console would allow MS and Sony to debut hardware on a mature 28nm process rather than choosing between well-established 40nm silicon and still-dicey 28nm yields in 2012. With SSD production continuing to ramp, both companies would have more options when it comes to including cheap solid state storage in future designs, too.
As for dev kits, it’s important to understand that there’s a world of difference between “dev kit” and “developer version of finali ed shipping hardware.” An early dev kit is a hardware platform that’s been kludged into providing something like next-generation performance, often in ways that might make Frankenstein shudder. In the case of the Xbox 360, Microsoft could slap on an actual heatsink+fan, ramp the CPU, GPU, and RAM clock speeds, solder on higher density RAM chips to improve system memory, and bring the L2 cache up to full processor speed.
The end result wouldn’t be a next-generation Xbox, but it would give developers a taste of what to expect further down the line, particularly if MS chooses to stick with the Xenon CPU and an ATI GPU. MS and Sony undoubtedly have next-gen consoles in the planning stages and Microsoft may well talk about theirs at CES — but a full-blown launch in 2012? Unlikely.
Rumors vs. reality: Next-gen consoles from Sony, Microsoft likely still years away
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