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[AmyS]

Upgrading components of a modular console - No

New Console SKUs available every 2/3 years, with games support for 6 or 7 years - Quite Likely

Exactly my thoughts..

 

[Figments]

I think fans biggest mistake is thinking that Xbox was actually created for the gamers & that go for PlayStation too.

Xbox & PlayStation was made from the start to Trojan horse MS & Sony's store front into the living room & gamers just so happen to be the people who was buying interactive products that was connected to the TV so they used games to get in the living room.

Xbox One reveal was MS being kinda bold about their true intent but the gamers that they used for the last 10+ years to build up the Xbox name did not like the look into MS vision of taking over the TV & they got all that backlash & tried to fix things as much as they can but the damage was already done for the most part. Gamers was not going to let MS complete it's vision with the Xbox & they hated Kinect which is a big part of MS vision because it separate Xbox One from the other Multimedia devices & was the perfect way to take over the living room by making it simple for people to just say Xbox then the name of a show or whatever & it just work. The moment MS had to give up their vision of taking over the living room with Xbox using Kinect as the new control interface for all your TV / multimedia needs is the moment Xbox as a stand alone gaming console died.

Now that Halo , Forza & so on sells have fallen what reason besides Xbox Live do MS have for manufacturing a new Xbox vs selling you Windows 10 devices? Why make this special box just to sell you Halo when they can sell you the next Minecraft on any Windows device? They don't need the Xbox to put their store front in your living room anymore because they can sell you a Windows 10 STB.

...does this have anything at all to do with iterative hardware?

 

[DeepEnigma]

...does this have anything at all to do with iterative hardware?

Read the whole thread. There have been a lot of discourse shifts, in which this was relevant.

 

[Figments]

Read the whole thread. There have been a lot of discourse shifts, in which this was relevant.

I've been paying as close attention as I can, but the whole standpoint still seems silly to me to mention /now/.

But what do I know.

 

[SneakersSO]

What I don't understand is why having 2 or 3 closed Xbox SKU's would be more difficult for developers than having an unchecked number of Win10 boxes.

In either case, developers would be targeting a lesser hardware configuration, and users will determine how their software performs by choosing their hardware. But in the case of your win10 boxes, developers have no clue what hardware their customers will be using.

Regarding the bolded, My ,admittedly limited, understanding of development makes it seem like MS would want the software development process to more closely PC development; these units would just be running the UWP version of the game, and architecture would be similar enough between consoles to not require specialization.

We already develop for an unchecked number of Win10 boxes - its called PC development. I highly recommend reading Durante's post on PC Gamer regarding some of the concessions we make when looking at building a UWA version of a game and why many devs choose not to do it for their PC versions. The amount of concessions we have to make versus building a Win32 version is just too much for us to ever take UWP seriously.

The reason why targeting a weaker machine in a closed box environment in the same ecosystem is difficult for us is you still need to fully ensure your game is absolutely still playable to certain standard. Obviously, various games come out in various stages, but for the most part devs very much try to maintain a level of performance in the games they ship. If you add in another console, in particular one that is sub-dividing one ecosystem, you still have to code to that console's strengths & weaknesses. Even if we go with the assumption that the APU is identical but with higher clock speeds on the processors, we still have to do a ton of individual debugging & QA in order to ensure a solid performance.

Most console games only ship with the assets & configurations that the console would be able to support. The overwhelming majority of console games, save for a few exceptions, do not allow you to change specific graphical settings in their game. So its not like we're just gonna ship an Xbox version of a game, have that one disc run on two different machines, and have each machine choose the graphical settings of the game. That adds some other significant issues we'd have to QA for that I don't even want to begin thinking about.

 

[HAWDOKEN]

I think fans biggest mistake is thinking that Xbox was actually created for the gamers & that go for PlayStation too.

Xbox & PlayStation was made from the start to Trojan horse MS & Sony's store front into the living room & gamers just so happen to be the people who was buying interactive products that was connected to the TV so they used games to get in the living room.

Xbox One reveal was MS being kinda bold about their true intent but the gamers that they used for the last 10+ years to build up the Xbox name did not like the look into MS vision of taking over the TV & they got all that backlash & tried to fix things as much as they can but the damage was already done for the most part. Gamers was not going to let MS complete it's vision with the Xbox & they hated Kinect which is a big part of MS vision because it separate Xbox One from the other Multimedia devices & was the perfect way to take over the living room by making it simple for people to just say Xbox then the name of a show or whatever & it just work. The moment MS had to give up their vision of taking over the living room with Xbox using Kinect as the new control interface for all your TV / multimedia needs is the moment Xbox as a stand alone gaming console died.

Now that Halo , Forza & so on sells have fallen what reason besides Xbox Live do MS have for manufacturing a new Xbox vs selling you Windows 10 devices? Why make this special box just to sell you Halo when they can sell you the next Minecraft on any Windows device? They don't need the Xbox to put their store front in your living room anymore because they can sell you a Windows 10 STB.

I agree with most of what you said, except the premise that the xbox will go away. Under the scenario you described, that hypothetical windows 10 device MS will mass market for the living room will still be called an xbox.

 

[Azih]

Yeah the Xbox brand name is valuable for a Win10 set top box.

Unless Panoy wants everything to be a Surface.....

 

[onQ123]

I agree with most of what you said, except the premise that the xbox will go away. Under the scenario you described, that hypothetical windows 10 device MS will mass market for the living room will still be called an xbox.

Which is what I said earlier I don't know if they will keep the Xbox name on the hardware or not.

 

[RedSwirl]

I've given it some thought, and i've come up with the solution I do think MS will end up pursuing for this. This is my prediction anyway.

For starters, from my dev perspective, I just can't foresee how they go about fulfilling the promises they currently have while also maintaining it being a 'console'. Theres no way they'd garner the 3rd party support to support all of those machines, not to mention they couldn't build up a marketshare large enough to generate profit on any individual release within a reasonable timeframe, especially if this were a yearly or biannual release.

So, the solution I see is MS turning Xbox into a sort of living room PC box, a la steambox, and have it be an open-ended OS, rather than the closed OS that we currently get with the X1's version of Win10. Again, this would mean that they will have completely moved away from the traditional console platform, while still getting to sell a piece of hardware called 'Xbox' that consumers of their entertainment software could enjoy. I imagine the OS would be revised in some ways, but that it would be way more open than the current X1 OS is.

The benefit of turning your closed box console into an open-ended OS is that, you get to reap the benefits of having your machine be PC like. Depending on how they implement their new Xbox's OS, they could allow installation of non-UWP apps as well, allowing something like Steam on the box, which would really draw in some fans. You'd even be able to license Xbox to other hardware manufacturers and allow them to make their very own Xbox with different specs. At that point, its up to the user as to whether or not your machine could run any particular piece of software. This solves the development problem we have spent time discussing, as it would just run the PC version of games, which have code-bases which are targeted towards hardware manufacturers, and not specialized in the console's APU.

The success of this will depend on one thing: can MS get out of its own way to allow this to be successful? If they launch this box, but make the app-environment closed off, thus not allowing you to install Steam or Origin, and forcing you to only use the Windows Store, then the box will only ever be as supported as UWP gets (which as of right now, I don't see getting any more support than Origin does in terms of 3rd party releases). If the W10 Xbox OS is open-ended, allowing me to install most/any app I want, then not only do I have access to my Steam software library (and licenses on any other service I use), but all of it will carry forward onto any other device I use. But again, this relies on MS doing something MS has, in the past, proven incapable of doing.

I have to admit, making the Xbox literally run Windows 10 with no other changes to the hardware or price would make it one of the best value propositions on the PC market. It's more powerful (for gaming at least) than any $400 PC right now. That's assuming the Xbox can actually run Windows 10 as efficiently as whatever it runs now, and the Windows overhead doesn't drag it down to the level of a $400 PC. To boot, it has a Blu-Ray drive which is still pretty expensive for a PC. If all that worked out I could see people just buying Xbox Ones as cheap desktops. It would have to be Windows 10 because it wouldn't make sense for Microsoft to build another open OS.

If desktop apps worked on it I could see a lot of regular PC games being optimized to run well on Xbox since it would be a popular and easy target. It would likely be a boon to Valve.

For a little while now I've actually envisioned the idea of a console that's completely open from the software end (still offering an "official" digital store though), but still gives developers one or a small number of hardware targets to optimize for. I don't know about the viability of Microsoft licensing out the Xbox architecture. Again, how viable is trying to run desktop Windows 10 on that?

 

[Azih]

Desktop windows 10 runs on some absolutely terrible 7" tablets so I'm pretty sure that Xbox One could handle it.

 

[SneakersSO]

I have to admit, making the Xbox literally run Windows 10 with no other changes to the hardware or price would make it one of the best value propositions on the PC market. It's more powerful (for gaming at least) than any $400 PC right now. That's assuming the Xbox can actually run Windows 10 as efficiently as whatever it runs now, and the Windows overhead doesn't drag it down to the level of a $400 PC. To boot, it has a Blu-Ray drive which is still pretty expensive for a PC. If all that worked out I could see people just buying Xbox Ones as cheap desktops. It would have to be Windows 10 because it wouldn't make sense for Microsoft to build another open OS.

If desktop apps worked on it I could see a lot of regular PC games being optimized to run well on Xbox since it would be a popular and easy target. It would likely be a boon to Valve.

For a little while now I've actually envisioned the idea of a console that's completely open from the software end (still offering an "official" digital store though), but still gives developers one or a small number of hardware targets to optimize for. I don't know about the viability of Microsoft licensing out the Xbox architecture. Again, how viable is trying to run desktop Windows 10 on that?

I mean, you could absolutely run Desktop Windows 10 on an X1, if we're just talking technical requirements the OS has. However, the X1 has a low-tech ceiling that most devs make up for via specialization of the code base. Most PC's make games run through sheer processing power, versus the code base actually targeting the hardware its running on in any meaningful way. In that sense, there will be games that don't run well or at all on an X1 if we were just installing a Win32 version of the game on it.

Put it this way - when development reached a point on a project of mine where we brought over the PC build of our game to finally see how it ran on X1, it was a travesty. Went from 60 fps to 10fps. This was just getting the game to run on the machine, without any optimizing work done on our part for the machine itself. And that game wasn't a resource hog on PCs, thats just the nature of bringing your game code to console raw like that. We obviously got the performance up & got the game to run natively, but that was after doing a ton of work to it.