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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Well, this clinches it. The next generation of home consoles from Sony and Microsoft are going to, of necessity, run on minimally-customized, commodity hardware, with the end-user experience as sole differentiator. It has seemed like an obvious choice following the diminishing returns of Sony's adventures in exotic supercomputing architecture, but with a competitor at last combining a stationary-target PC with existing vertical integration and massive mind share and market share, they'll have no choice if they want to remain competitive. This industry is in for interesting times.

And heaven help them all if Apple brings apps to the Apple TV.

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As a counter-point, consider the Xbox and the Xbox360. The former was pretty much a garden-variety AT PC in an unusual form-factor with some rudimentary security. The latter is still mostly a PC, but has been customized much further.

Certainly much will remain the same, but in my opinion this progression has illustrated that it behooves console makers to customize to a notable degree.

The 360 bears little resemblance to "a PC". Unless your "PC" is a three-core SMT'd PowerPC with on-die GPU packing stupid-fast DRAM.

(It's not.)

I, for one, will mourn the loss of such exotic supercomputing architecture. Whether it's the massive clustered PS3 supercomputers that people built because of the commodity pricing/loss that Sony was willing to take or the absurdly difficult to utilize twin Hitachi CPU powered Sega Saturn, there is something very appealing (to a big nerd like me) about the sort of exotic hardware that game consoles have used in the past. No more RISCy moves from the console builders I suppose. Ho ho.

The original Xbox consisted of commodity hardware (Intel P3 era Celeron CPU and a GeForce 3-like GPU, if I remember correctly). Although cheap to develop and produce initially, it apparently cost Microsoft dearly later on in the lifecycle because Microsoft didn't own the CPU design, which allowed Intel to charge for more than just manufacturing cost of the CPUs. Compare this to the XBox 360, the design of which Microsoft commissioned from IBM[1]; it's subsequently been through a few die shrinks, reducing production costs. Intel would have to be pretty desperate to license their commodity CPU designs to third parties. So I can't see an Intel-powered console happening anytime soon.

Having said that, I could imagine AMD licensing a CPU or APU design to Microsoft or Sony[2]. After all, the Wii and Xbox360 already contain custom GPUs of theirs. Still, the current consoles have done well with PPC, so they may just stick with that.

[1] Sony actually paid for some of it because it's basically 3 Cell PPUs glued together, but that's another story

[2] AMD's CPUs are probably not complicated enough for Sony's liking, though. :-P

I could imagine AMD licensing a CPU or APU design to Microsoft or Sony... AMD's CPUs are probably not complicated enough for Sony's liking, though.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/03/02/sony-playstation-4-will-b...

Hah. Glad I'm not a betting man. :-)

"massive mind share and market share"

The only thing massive about Valves mind share is maybe the preception of it among HN users.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22valve%22%2C%22st...

There's always a tendency to wonder if any new product will be the new category killer. I think we can be confident this isn't. As the article says the Steambox isn't trying to compete with the next xbox, and for good reason -- it would lose horribly.

That doesn't mean it won't be good or I won't get one or it won't be a success. This is a good and logical move for Valve that provides good value for their existing userbase and opportunity for growth.

Way to ruin it with realism! Ultimately Steambox will still use MS Windows and therefor DirectX, so it's not like it's a huge jump from an XBox 360 anyways, right?

"with the end-user experience as sole differentiator"

Does Kinect not count as a hardware differentiator? For this reason alone MS has the be the favorite among dedicated game boxes.

Nintendo's been the most innovative historically but they've already shown their hand and sadly for them it's holding a ginormous controller that I'm 97% sure is a refurbished Sega Gamegear.

The only question left about Nintendo is who wins the exclusive rights to Mario/Link and co. It's probably worth the most to Microsoft but Apple has a lot of cash overseas they don't know what to do with.

Never underestimate Nintento. When they showed off the Wii Remote back at the TGS, nobody was stunned. Everyone was puzzled or dissapointed, the talks about who will get the rights to their IP was already going on... which was kinda stupid because Nintendo sits on one of the largest piles of liquid money in the gaming industry... they could sit out a whole console generation and still produce another one... don't count them out so fast.

Nintendo's strategy made sense though. A bunch of people didn't want to hear that the gaming paradigm might be changing, but that's besides the point. Personally, I didn't know if they were going to win or lose with their strategy, but I thought that it made sense.

Right now I'm confused about their decision to abandon the Wiimote though. If they're upset that they didn't get as many 3rd-party titles, IIRC that had more to do with the hardware constraints of the platform (I remember it being described as two GameCubes strapped together).

  > they could sit out a whole console generation and still produce
  > another one... don't count them out so fast.

Isn't that the story of Sega though? The Saturn was a flop, and then the DreamCast wasn't enough to rescue them from becoming a software-only company.

I believe the idea is that the Wiimote will continue to be used alongside the new controller in e.g. local multiplayer games. At least, that's what they had set up in some of their E3 demos last year.

Apple purchasing nintendo would be interesting. I don't think Apple has anything to offer in terms of gaming, but they know how to manufacture great hardware (and for less than competitors), and they know how to market and distribute content.

I'm not sure that apple itself has nothing to offer. I have a feeling it is only a matter of time before apple releases something that is of serious interest to gamers.

It may not be a games console as such but think something with a large screen , an app store and some new input method that lends itself well to gaming.

Apple's announcement of what will likely be the iPad 3 coincides with GDC. I would think an iPad 3 + 1080p AppleTV is a compelling console replacement. I bet that is their move: to make your TV a monitor for the iPad. That solves the interface issue with TV in one fell swoop.

I think this could work well for some categories of games, for example strategy games but there are still many popular games this wouldn't work so well for at all(driving games, fps etc)

So either they will focus on a different category of gamer/games or there will have to be some other more game specific input device such as a controller.

Few points:

(1) I don't think Apple would buy Nintendo but...

(2) If Wii U flops worldwide (as many expect) then Nintendo's default option is to go the Sega route and just produce software.

(3) Unlike Sega however, Nintendo's IP is worth substantial market share so I'd expect a major bidding war for exclusivity. Exclusivity would also allow Nintendo to continue to develop for a single mobile and home platform as they do now.

Let's say we all move to commodity PC hardware in our consoles. At that point, one of two things will happen: the 'consoles' will have ever-shifting hardware and be complete hell to work for, or developers will code to the hardware and not go beyond, effectively stagnating PC game progress. That feels like a net negative for everyone to me.

You're assuming that the hardware will be upgradable. It won't be. As noted elsewhere, the Xbox basically was a PC.

This console cycle has been characterized by software and online, and that's how it will be from this point out. 360 has a very good OS and networking stack, PS3 not so much. This is why 360 is outselling the PS3, even though it's the weaker-powered of the two.

I don't see this changing in the next cycle either; PS Vita's software looks awful.

The Steam box will be no different; it's about the software, not the hardware.

I think what he is actually doing is taking a loose interpretation of "commodity". That is to say, if consoles are built on "commodity" hardware, that implies different consoles will come from the factory with different hardware that is only partially fungible.

I'm not sure what it is really called, this sort of "fungible but not fungible"- for example, x86 processors are fungible in the functional regard but not in the performance regard.

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