MS just stealth-launched their own version of Steam Box (Off-Topic)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, June 13, 2016, 19:54 (3252 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, June 13, 2016, 19:58

MS expects these to sell to gamers who want superior performance but don't want to build their own PC. This will essentially compete against alienware/razer gaming systems except it will be more console-oriented. Really, the Xbox is getting less and less different than just a PC these days anyway so I'd guess MS isn't worried about selling the hardware. Instead they want to build out the Xbox community by including Windows 10 users.

Their messaging about "an end to console generations" or whatever wording they used, along with their range of platforms, speaks to the idea of selection of gaming machines across a range of price points. The new Xbox One S is the mass-market, affordable home console. The Windows 10 platform is for the PC crowd. Scorpio will fill the niche of high-powered console. It will probably be too expensive for most console gamers when it first launches, but as time goes on it will get cheaper and smaller until before you know it Scorpio becomes the affordable home console while another new machine gets launched to fill the high-end void.

I remember hearing about the fact that both console makers screwed themselves this time with the hardware. It was itself decent, but it had not much space to grow because it was too familiar… Look at Uncharted 1 vs Uncharted 2. A huge leap as Naughty Dog figured out what to do with all those parallel processors inside the Cell. It's always been that way with consoles: you generally get odd specialized hardware that becomes more capable because the developers can squeeze more out of it as they learn, and so you get steadily improving games even as the console ages.

However, the hardware is essentially known and very PC like in the current gen. I remember hearing that launch games were basically going to look as good as games later in the console's life cycle. Because developers already knew how to squeeze the hardware. Hence, we are already looking towards upgrades.

So maybe they wouldn't have had to do this if they'd just made the hardware weirder. I mean, the PS2 is the most successful console in history, and the emotion engine was weird as shit.