I know, I know, the death of consoles has been greatly exaggerated. We talked a whole lot about the end of the living room box just before the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One. The story goes like this: the traditional concept of a console is outdated and under siege from mobile gaming, microconsoles, streaming and even PCs. The PS4 and Xbox One are dinosaurs, that argument says, and the niche they used to occupy simply isn’t theirs anymore. The PS4 (and also the Xbox One, to a lesser degree) roundly proved that arguement wrong, proving that people do indeed want a gaming box to sit underneath their TVs, even here in 2016. Consoles aren’t dying — they’re stronger than ever.
The thing is, it’s still happening. Consoles are dying, and Microsoft MSFT +0.57% and Sony are the ones killing them.
There have been enough reports of a 4K PS4 that it’s as close to confirmed as we can get short of an actual announcement. It’s a (somewhat) unprecedented mid-generation upgrade, but Sony won’t be alone in the process. Microsoft hasn’t said anything specific, but Phil Spencer has strongly hinted at the possibility of an upgraded Xbox One, and it seems terribly unlikely he’d even mention it if the company weren’t working on it. And, right there, we’ve got a major break from the basic idea of the console as it has been handed down since the Atari. We now have as single console generation that has at least two — and likely more — variants on a single console. Or, more to the point, we no longer have a console generation at all.
A console is pretty much impossible to define without being pretty arbitrary about it, but the thing that those companies are describing starts to look much, much more like a PC or an Apple AAPL +0.90% product than it does like an SNES. We’ll have the same game running on two different Playstations, we’ll inevitably have graphics settings (automatic or manual), we’ll have just a little more of those decisions that come along with varied hardware. It’s a small, but vitally important shift: the console is no longer just the box that plays the game, full stop. And it’s that essential console magic is lost in favor of the iPhone model. It brings this somewhat quixotic devices much more into step with the broader world of consumer electronics.
The motivation from Microsoft and Sony’s side is pretty clear: they get to avoid looking obsolete, they get to take advantage of new technologies, and they get to sell two consoles to someone they might have only sold one to otherwise. But they’re both going to lose some of the safety that comes along with having this world of the traditional console all to themselves (along with Nintendo ). It’s a smart move, ultimately — they’re preempting possible moves from competitors to horn in on the console space, and they’re elevating the console to something less idiosyncratic at the same time. But it’s a very different game now.
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