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Xbox boss says current-gen console prices ‘won’t come down’ like they used to | VGC
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I've been feeling like console generations don't need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view. Rather than making new consoles as tech evolves, since we are facing diminishing returns, they are making them larger and more expensive. Given how the economy is, and how much people can afford, if they expect to keep making future consoles increasingly more expensive, they'll find quickly that there is a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an entertainment device.
Not to mention that the production costs to keep up with the graphics potential of these extremely powerful consoles are also increasingly unsustainable. It's time to focus on game design above anything else.
New consoles don't come out in response to new technology, though. They never have. The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
They still need a reason for people to buy them. The usual one being "look how much prettier it is!", but they are getting to a point the leaps of graphical fidelity enabled by technology are smaller and smaller, but the costs of making everything higher definition are skyrocketing.
They are following the Apple playbook. Put out a new system every 2 years and eventually will find some arbitrary ways to force users to upgrade.
I don't think that is going to work as well for consoles as it does for phones. People can just keep playing older games. Living in a third-world country I know that too well. And if they try to sabotage the consoles, that might drive people away from console gaming entirely.
The inner generation consoles aren't marketed to those who already own that generation. So the console cycle is still over every 7 years or so.
Apple doesn’t force you to upgrade. They have the longest support length in mobile. What they are fantastic at is convincing you that you need to upgrade.
Don't they stop giving updates to slightly older devices. Also, I read reports of them slowing down older models as an incentive to upgrade. Late Stage Capitalism
They of course stop updating old devices. The 5 year old iPhone XR is getting updated to iOS 17 this month, and they are still putting out security updates to the 9 year old iPhone 5S.
They started limiting the CPU clock on older devices that had poor batteries in situations where it would try to draw more power than the battery could maintain. Identical devices with good batteries were not slowed down. Literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, but they failed to communicate what was happening which very likely lead people to buy new phones instead of getting their batteries replaced. At that time I had an iPhone for personal use and a Galaxy S5 for work. The S5 started doing the exact thing that Apple prevented when my battery started wearing out and random apps would crash the phone. However, unlike Apple where I could pay them $99 to fix it, Samsung and Verizon essentially told me to go pound sand and wouldn't even sell us an official battery. We resorted to buying some sketchy thing off Amazon that never seemed to be as good. Kinda funny how Apple got all the hate, yet Samsung was the one that let me down.