Console Price Cuts And The Holiday Season

Thanks to CNN Money for their article discussing the state of the console market heading into the Xmas season. The author discusses the lack of major price-cuts for the PS2 and Xbox, suggesting: "Sony feels it can make more money this holiday season from its existing customer base", and speculating: "It's more and more likely that the reason we haven't seen price cuts from Sony and Microsoft is their next generation machines won't hit stores until 2006." If this is the case, it's suggested that "...the life cycle of this [hardware] generation will be the longest of any in the industry's short history", perhaps surprising considering rapidly advancing technology.

Rumors ? Somebody must know ...

[snowtigger]

I am rather surprised of how nobody seems to "know" when the next generation consoles will be out.

When I spoke to some Xbox developers, they told us that they received a test machine (standard PC) about two years before the official launch. Then some other test hardware dropped in from time to time.

Considering that developing a game takes around two years, we should be getting indications in advance. The developer scene for Xbox is growing bigger (google for xbox development), so I expect them to have a difficult time keeping this one secret.

To show off a new console would be hard without cool games. Simply porting existing games would be too easy, since you wouldn't use all the potential in the console and miss the cool-factor. The least thing to do would be to create new graphics to make up for the advances in the graphics chip.

The same thing goes for the GameCube and the PS2
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If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up space in the middle

Re:Diminishing returns

[CaptMonkeyDLuffy]

Just a quick FYI to tag in here, but the Cube supports 480p as well... No higher resolutions, but it does manage progressive scan, and I at least find it a rather noticeable improvement.

And, I'm not certain about the Xbox, but I know on the Cube side of things the 480p support varies by game(whether its present or not), I believe the XBox has a similar situation, though I'm not certain.

Re:Diminishing returns

[grahamwest]

Yes, I should've mentioned that GameCube also does 480p. You are also correct that support for this varies a lot from game to game on GameCube. This is for multiple reasons, some technical and some process/testing related. On Xbox you get 480p support basically for free since there's no extra game UI, you're already spending the memory and fillrate for full-height framebuffers and the video circuit setup automatically engages 480p (as long as it's valid and enabled in the dashboard) unless your code specifically tells it not to. As a result there are only a handful of Xbox games which do not run in 480p.

It's fun to show Star Fox Adventures on GameCube and Panzer Dragoon Orta on Xbox to people who don't appreciate how much widescreen and HDTV adds to the gaming experience.