Kim: Xbox 360 has a ten-year life-span


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But it'll look rubbish compared to a cheap PC by then.

The point isn't the PC looking better the point is the plateau we have now reached for human representation.

Look at these screens of current console games

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In 2015 people will still easily recognize these as human beings, with considerable detail to the face and body - We even have in some cases individual hair work, facial scars and blemishes, etc. These graphics will not date badly, yes they will look outclassed by graphics in 2015, but they won't look bad.

Look at these screenshots of humans for the last generations on consoles

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As long as games maintain the ability to not age badly they will remain "current" enough to stand out in the market.

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^ But I think we all agree that it'd be nice to have that "pre-rendered" look in "real time" gaming.

I'm always for the game over graphics argument, but I'm just pointing out the other argument...

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^ But I think we all agree that it'd be nice to have that "pre-rendered" look in "real time" gaming.

I'm always for the game over graphics argument, but I'm just pointing out the other argument...

Yes of course but this argument is fueled by money, and you WILL get your pre-rendered graphics, it will come with the next revision of consoles in some years, a bit earlier on the PC.

It would be awesome to see Sony and MS release new tech every 2-3 years, but can

a) They afford it

and

b) Enough of us afford it so that a) doesn't happen?

Let me explain, these companies need to ship MILLIONS and MILLIONS of units of hardware and software to turn profit. Look at the amount of money MS lost on the Xbox, and if you say the figure 24 million to someone, they aren't exactly going to tell you that's a small figure. Though to a console manufacturer releasing bleeding edge technology it IS a small figure.

The PC market is run on open hardware, Nvdia make their money by making only graphics cards (heed my argument I'm aware they brand other pc products). Sony and MS have to go through R&D for a whole console, essentially a whole PC, operating system, all the hardware inside, controller inputs, methods of communication, then all the money plundered into 1st party software development and development kits for 3rd parties.

Then they ALSO have to go sell their console at a loss to make it affordable on top of all the money spent above.

So you say, why not make parts inside a console replaceable? Well that's then "a PC" and in return you hit all the issues PC games have with compatibility, hardware/software scaling, etc.

The great thing about consoles is everyone experiences the same thing and it's much easier for devs continually working with one hardware revision - That's the plus side of the console to the PC.

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^ But I think we all agree that it'd be nice to have that "pre-rendered" look in "real time" gaming.

That is always what I argue about as well. Definitely will be nice to get to that point some day.

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@Audioboxer: Dude, I'm not arguing against you. Totally with you on this. I would love for the 360 to last another 6 years before the next Xbox is even released. I've spent way too much on this generation to see it go away so soon, IMO.

Especially with today's consoles relying much more heavily on software, internet connectivity and modularity, there really is no need to usher in a whole new console. The software can be upgraded and improved without having to change the hardware; just look at the original Xbox 360 Dashboard vs NXE. You can go tremendously further with software today than you could have in the past. There's really less need to iterate hardware as often as we had to in the past.

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I will believe it (That a PC game looking MUCH MUCH MUCH better than a current Xbox 360 game) whenever I SEES it! LOL :D

PCs always look better than consoles, they can pump out resolutions much better than consoles, better texture work and support higher levels of AA.

Of course you need a really good system to do these things so unless your a PC enthusiast you're going to get better results out of your console.

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I will believe it (That a PC game looking MUCH MUCH MUCH better than a current Xbox 360 game) whenever I SEES it! LOL :D

It's not difficult to find a PC game that looks better than current gen consoles. The difficulty is in actually finding real PC hardware capable of doing so.

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I really think if MS could get away with a console every 3 years, they would.

I think the change in stance, is more due to the economy and how much HD gaming has cost the industry.

Ms can't afford to start a new console and abandon the old one as quick as they want.

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I will believe it (That a PC game looking MUCH MUCH MUCH better than a current Xbox 360 game) whenever I SEES it! LOL :D

I think you're been sarcastic, if not just let me know. But PC games look much better but you have to have enough power to run the game @ 60fps, which is sad to say it's not there yet unless you're bill gates son (cost of making such PC will go into $$,$$$).

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sorry lutor, but with 5 posts under your belt and this kind of attitude i'm suspecting you don't belong in the gamer's hangout.

listen to Dr. Asik and maash, between those two you have the perfect logic in my book.

what Kim is saying is just that support will go on for ten years, at least as they see things now. They also confirmed work is ongoing on a new console, whatever that means, and i doubt they'll sit on that design idly for six years. I was hoping for a new machine by late 2010, but no later than 011. By 012 anyone currently posting here will feel the existing consoles are getting long in the tooth. as Asik noted, a major indication of that is the rather samey look of too many games these days.

Besides, Kim was also the person who boasted the 360 will outsell the PS brand this generation, and this year we heard nothing of that. Claims are just that - claims. Proof is in the pudding.

I don't think the number of posts mean nothing actually, and attitude is very subjective. So I think your logics fail in that sentence. What I meant in my post is that graphical technology must not be the main factor when considering a new console release date. In fact, if you look at the past, graphics have never been the main factor, as some gamers want it to be. I consider those users consumists enrolled in the "OMG there is a new thing, I want it" cycle.

I am getting it hard to agree with the 2012 as the year for a new console release date. You have to take in count the financial factor this time, because this generation has a little to do with the past ones, mainly because of the macroeconomic enviroment. I am expecting it to stop existing "a new console everyone release" year, like it happened in the past. So, when Microsoft feel gamers are stopping buying their games, or there exists the potential of that happening (like when there is a new, better option in the market).

But for that to happen, graphics will not be the key, it will be gameplay. The way we play games.

Think about it a little, what's next in gaming? 3D realistic graphics? real immersive gameplay? or better games that are actually fun to play and challenging?

I can't see the future, but the trend is getting there. Just look at E3, yeah exclusives and everything, but the most important feature was the demonstration of new technologies that maybe in 20 years will be the ticket to play for consoles.

I am very curious at the XBOXLA success.

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It's not difficult to find a PC game that looks better than current gen consoles. The difficulty is in actually finding real PC hardware capable of doing so.

Like what?

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Like what?
Crysis certainly looks a generation ahead of the games that were released in the console space in the same time period, at least running on today's hardware at the same resolutions (720p). It's unfair in my view to expect a console game to drive a display at 1600x1200 or higher resolutions at 100 fps because that's not what they were designed to do.

Sony is financially unable to be a first mover in the next generation right now, they're going to have to stick with PS3 for a while to break even on dev costs and market initiation costs based on eventually having a positive margin on hardware sales and their license fees on game sales. Their recovery period is long on that system. Microsoft will be happy to wait, every quarter that goes by is another quarter that they can use to refine their next generation system. Given that the next generation of consoles will still be driving HDTVs (presumably at 1080p60 as the default resolution), there isn't that much of a leap in performance necessary to take what we have now to "prerendered realism" presuming that anyone wants that. The hardware that they might be developing now will be perfectly adequate for driving that system five years from now, and would be very cheap. Two hundred dollar next-gen entry price for consoles? We could be looking at a golden age.

Digital distribution of "full retail" releases is going to open up new opportunities for 360 as well. Assuming that media capacity and performance is a limiting factor (and I think it is, since you have limits on total textures available for the entire game, and you have load time factors to consider), downloadable releases get you out of that quandry (in a world where someone can download a 10 gigabyte game overnight on their normal internet connection, which is true even on my half-assed bargain basement cable connection, and would be a matter of an hour or two on my old FIOS connection which I dearly want back).

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You know, I have always said that I enjoyed games more back in the past. And by the past I mean Nes, Snes, Sega, Nintendo 64.

I stopped buying consoles then. And I think the quality standar is way below now. I don't know why all this hype about graphics, maybe because the people gaming right now are younger than me (I am 23) and they didn't get to play those classic games. I have a cousin that is 18 years old, so he started gaming with the Nintendo 64, and all he cares is graphics.

It is sad because gameplay is what a game is all about, being graphics just the envelope, and I agree, graphics add realism and immersion.

I think that right now developing companies are done with learning the graphics engines, and are going to start taking care of the gameplay, that's why it IS good that the 360 will be running until 2015. Nintendo understood that (Read the book "The Blue Ocean Strategy"), but took it too far for my taste.

I am OK with consoles getting better graphics at each iteration, but I totally disagree and I even hate people that all they care about is graphics. If you want a graphics driven entertainment go and watch a movie, those are realistic graphics ("LOL"), consoles are about being interactive.

For the last, if you disagree with me. Go and play GOW, the whole campaing, and then go and play Super Metroid, and you'll know what I mean. That little unkown feeling that you'll experience, that is fun.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. That's a thought I've often heard but rarely as well expressed. And although it definitely has some value, I must fundamentally disagree with it.

The fundamental problem with your graphics vs gameplay argument is that you can't honestly look back on an old game you found very fun like Super Metroid and say it looks bad. At least it looked great for its time; it still looks good, even if hugely backwards technically, but the artwork, even low-res and 2d, is clever and effective. I'm sure you cannot honestly say that if Super Metroid looked bland, generic or awkward, it would have been just as much fun. Even back then, good games were also games that looked great.

And that's inevitable, because gameplay is interaction, and the fundamental way the game interacts with you is by its visual presentation. If the presentation is uneffective or unexciting, the gameplay suffers directly as a result. You should check out the developer commentaries for Valve's recent games, Team Fortress 2, HL2:E2, Portal, etc., a lot of what makes them fun to play is how they convey information to the player visually, with the use of specific shaders. If TF2 didn't use non-realistic rendering, a technique made possible by the technical advance of shaders, the gameplay would simply not be the same; maps wouldn't be designed the same way, classes wouldn't be given the same roles, etc.

The advent of real-time 3D-graphics itself is a major breakthrough for gameplay. A gameplay like that of Counter-Strike would be impossible without modern (well, post-1998) graphics cards. You can't integrate the gameplay notion of crash damage in a racing sim if you don't have the CPU and GPU horsepower to give the player a somewhat believable representation of it. Thief 1 couldn't integrate the gameplay notion of a guard revealing you with his torchlight, because dynamic light sources were too expensive to compute; in Thief 3 that is possible, and it makes the game that more fun.

I've always been fascinated by beautiful, effective graphics, from my initial discovery of video games on the Commodore 64 to Assassin's Creed on my Geforce 8. I think it's a mistake to oppose graphics with gameplay when graphics are the main output device of the game, its main medium of interaction with the player. And better hardware and technology have and will continue to enable developers to create new types of gameplay.

I also think that the argument of graphics vs gameplay often boil down to "the old games were the shiznit", where one should realize that he's simply lost the excitement of discovering new video games he had in his first encounters with that medium. It's normal to not be as excited as you were back then, but objectively, great games are still released today. Maybe you just got a little too old for it. ;)

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Dr_Asik you really made me laugh, in the good way I mean, because you are right about me getting too old. You make a point when referring to visuals as the final output of videogames, after all, that's why we call'em VIDEOgames.

I totally agree that enjoy is the result of the visual representation of your success in the game. But what I've found in recent years is that developers are focusing too much in graphic impact. I mean, when you have constraints like time and money, your efforts should focus in making the game challenging enough so you want to come back and have some more, when you achieve that, you should make it look pretty.

What I totally disagree is developers covering their faults with shiny graphics, and that's what I see a lot lately. You see my point? Devs trying to make movies first, and games later, then mixing it together.

I totally agree that an awful game does not have the same appeal than a beautiful game. I brought back the example of Super Metroid because the last week I had two gaming options: The Lost and Damn vs Super Metroid. I took Metroid and man, I enjoyed that time so much, even when I played both (one day TLAD, next SM, and then only SM until I finished it). It was then when it came to my mind.

Going back to the topic, 360 have demonstrated that it has a lot of potential (Forza 3), but it still have the horsepower to let developers try new things.

Let me throw you a question: Why Microsoft moved from Xbox to 360 so fast?

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Let me throw you a question: Why Microsoft moved from Xbox to 360 so fast?
Oh that's a simple one. There were two main reasons:

1. Microsoft decided that it needed to be first to market with their new console, and Sony was indicating a worldwide launch of the PS3 either in the same timeframe as 360 actually launched or the following spring (they later changed their mind of course). Based on the assumption that they couldn't launch AFTER PS3, they had no choice based on the information they had but to launch when they did.

2. Microsoft was losing significant amounts of money on every Xbox unit they ever sold. They were never able to cost-reduce it because of problems with their partners. They anticipated that things like the video chip from Nvidia would drop in price over time, but the nature of the computer industry that they didn't understand then was that chipmakers don't continue making the same chip for years and years, they replace their existing lineup of chips with new more powerful chips so that they can maintain their profit margins. So basically by the end of the Xbox cycle, that off-the-shelf Nvidia chip was only being manufactured for Xboxes, and the cost of running the line just for that purpose put a bottom limit on the price of that component. The mandatory hard drive and the CPU from Intel were in similar positions. No one makes old size hard drives, they make bigger ones every year so they can sell them at the same price. The last model Xboxes had much bigger hard drives than the original ones, they just never talked about it, there was no selling point there because you were never going to amass enough content to fill it based on their model at the time (you weren't downloading video and copying full DVDs to your harddrive).

Microsoft tried to convince Nvidia and Intel to let them outsource production of those CPUs to fabs in Asia, but both companies refused, and since they owned the IP on those chips, there was no way to do it.

They are no longer in that situation on their new console. Both the Xenon and Xenos chips were produced by IBM and ATI on a contract basis, and Microsoft owns them, so they are able to play overseas chip fabs off IBM and AMD to keep prices lower, and they are able to die-shrink and eventually merge those two chips into a single die (rumoured to be the next major hardware change after the current Jasper).

Losing money on the old system, need to launch the new one in a specific timeframe = killing Xbox exactly when they did.

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What I totally disagree is developers covering their faults with shiny graphics, and that's what I see a lot lately. You see my point? Devs trying to make movies first, and games later, then mixing it together.
Do you have any specific example of that? In my experience, the most fun games I've played were also the best-looking ones, and the most boring ones also looked bland and uninspiring. I'm tempted to say Oblivion is an example of a game with bad gameplay and good graphics, but even then, I found the animations awkward and the lighting of human models disgusting, so I can't say it really has excellent graphics.
Going back to the topic, 360 have demonstrated that it has a lot of potential (Forza 3), but it still have the horsepower to let developers try new things.
They're trying to push 30fps at 720p on the equivalent of an X1950XT, while on PC we're 3 gpu and nearly 2 DirectX generations ahead. It's so depressing to think the creative power of the gaming industry is held back by the purely economic constraint of having to tailor a game around 4-year old hardware. Anyway, I've made my rant clear so I'm done here.
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Asik, you're making far too much sense for an online forum. That never works. Why anyone would argue against having better hardware and better looking games is beyond me. Good observation on your part, lutor, we call them video games for a reason. The driving force behind the industry from a technical, not fiscal, perspective has always been to achieve parity with what the human brain considers reality. True, the only thing that could stall that is the money issue, but if the mid 80's didn't put much of a crimp in this march, i doubt current conditions will.

It's also true the companies involved have an appetite for profits, the only reason you're getting all this motion control and assorted mainstream crap is their experimentation with abandoning the gamer model in favor of a wider "entertainment center" base. Again, i reiterate my stance that anyone in favor of something like that shouldn't be on a gamer's forum.

and AB, again with those screen shots...like magik and others pointed out, those are touched up stills, the actual game looks nothing like that. Every time i have to wait for textures to update i yearn for the next console cycle. And you people call yourselves gamers, the audacity!

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Asik, you're making far too much sense for an online forum. That never works. Why anyone would argue against having better hardware and better looking games is beyond me. Good observation on your part, lutor, we call them video games for a reason. The driving force behind the industry from a technical, not fiscal, perspective has always been to achieve parity with what the human brain considers reality. True, the only thing that could stall that is the money issue, but if the mid 80's didn't put much of a crimp in this march, i doubt current conditions will.

It's also true the companies involved have an appetite for profits, the only reason you're getting all this motion control and assorted mainstream crap is their experimentation with abandoning the gamer model in favor of a wider "entertainment center" base. Again, i reiterate my stance that anyone in favor of something like that shouldn't be on a gamer's forum.

and AB, again with those screen shots...like magik and others pointed out, those are touched up stills, the actual game looks nothing like that. Every time i have to wait for textures to update i yearn for the next console cycle. And you people call yourselves gamers, the audacity!

Nothing like that, as in the real gameplay uses 16bit sprites? :laugh:

I believe you'll need to go back and play Mass Effect and watch gameplay of both Heavy Rain and Alan Wake, the games look pretty much exactly the same in motion. Arguably the majority of games ALWAYS look better in motion as it's easier to pickout flaws and slight discrepancies in stills.

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good thing you said arguably. and you don't need to believe, i just replayed Mass Effect last month, it's an amazing game but the visuals have major flaws, as in texture update. don't be argumentative for the sake of it, you know full well stills are worked on and polished, not to mention trailers and E3 demos - including the live ones. They could well be playing on the PC dev station they used, not 360 spec hardware, or PS3 for that matter.

This isn't to say games nowadays don't look good, but they can certainly look better.

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Asik, you're making far too much sense for an online forum. That never works. Why anyone would argue against having better hardware and better looking games is beyond me.
I'm not sure you get my point. The situation today is different from 5 years ago. Up until recently, video games took advantage of the latest PC hardware; there was dramatic progress year after year. We have now entered a period of relative stagnation dictated by the economical predominance of the current-gen consoles. This is not something everyone realizes, yet it's a disturbing phenomenon.

If you figure that out as obvious, then I can only praise your awareness, but you never know my exposition might profit to someone. No need to drown it in sarcasm.

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This isn't to say games nowadays don't look good, but they can certainly look better.

Yeah, I think I'm ready for an update. This gens graphics just don't "wow" me at all anymore. At most I would call them serviceable. I've been playing Fallout 3 and the graphics in it are ass. I love the story and gameplay, but I would enjoy it a lot more if the graphics didn't let it down.

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right on jianbing, am with you. wouldn't go as far as calling them ass, but certainly i'd like to know something's in the oven and dinner will be served in the next couple of years.

Asik, wasn't being sarcastic at all, i agree with your above posts 100%.

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