Consoles that can be upgraded like a PC. Consoles that can make TV a friendly PC enviroment that PCs can do now. Why pay more for a PC? Have you seen some of the prices for a good PC lately? Who is to say these new consoles would be any cheaper to upgrade to full PC funcionality?
well, I wasn\'t exactly refering to peripheral upgrades, but system design upgrades for instance. On the PC the need of buying the newest graphicscard to play the newest game is rather expensive and a waste if you look at what\'s achievable on a dedicated architecture. Also, consoles are being sold at a loosing price and to stay competitive, I don\'t see Sony or any other company willing to try a price-tag of over $300 USD. In 2000, try finding a PC that had similar specs + a monitor with a NTSC/PAL output (we wouldn\'t want to add price by adding a monitor). If you look at it more closely, you\'ll see that there wasn\'t any consumer based PC at the time that could have competed with the PS2\'s performance (tapped or not tapped).
Inferior Gaming? I think you underestimate the power of a super gaming rig. If it were possible to nail a moving target for developers you would see some games that would blow anything away out now.
As you quoted correctly, I was refering to
gaming, not graphics or anything else. With
inferiour I mean costs involved of buying inefficiant/expensive upgrades, installing process, often crashes, bugs, lagging framerates at times, driver problems etc. Yes, it is inferiour compared to a plug & play console. No added cost, just insert disc and you\'ll find yourself playing seconds later.
What you are getting now is games that can run on the slowest system. Look how easy it is to port any console game to PC and it looks as good or better. I would dare say the opposite. PC gaming has become more popular because of the new consoles. Nobody ever talked about PC gaming as much as they do now.
PC gaming might have grown, but compared to the console industry, it\'s tiny small. Besides, what I was refering to goes beyond just playing games. I am talking about Sony\'s clear plans of delving into the settop boxes area. Have an entertainment system hooked up to your TV that enables internet browsing, email, simple wordprocessing. Beyond that, you\'d have a system that can communicate with other electronics such as HiFi system, Digital video cameras etc. Sony had a lot planned for PS2 already but as the market isn\'t ready, I guess we\'ll see something like this later. Why do you think Microsoft jumped into this market? Sure DirectX is an arguement, but with a settop box retailing at a much lower cost and able to run what is a casual consumers most frequantly used programs without the PC typical hassles of installing, bugs etc - I think it\'s a worthy offer. Of course for this to happen, TVs need to reach HDTV status or else this plan would already fail on resolutions alone. We\'ll see though what the future will bring.
PS. Another reason why PC gaming is inferiour, is the price that you pay for new graphic cards every 6 months. If the PC architecture was somewhat better and had less bottlenecks, you wouldn\'t have to upgrade every 6 months. Unfortunately, the PC is very bottlenecked and therefore the price to upgrade will always be higher than what you could achieve by designing a new system that\'s good for one thing: gaming.
