Thoughts on the Future: Consoles

Thoughts on the Future: Consoles

It's now 2013 and we've seen one new console from Nintendo, the WiiU another repeat of the Wii in the sense that it packs what we can now call last-gen specs riding on the dream of what will either go down as an innovation or as a gimmick. Nothing has been shown by Sony nor Microsoft, yet we should at least hear an announcement soon. Some specs and ideas have been through the rumor mill and come out to public, but not much to go on. Yet not too early to speculate what we can expect to see.

Safe Bets/Probable

• Blu-Ray - For both consoles, Blu-Ray seems to be the standard for movies and games since it allows for enough storage to fit a whole game or two. With drive speeds increasing and prices dropping there's little reason to suspect Microsoft won't hop aboard and that Sony won't continue on.
• 1080p 3D - It's being done now (sort of) so it's sure to be at least supported in the future
• Non-Custom hardware - Designing custom hardware is going the way of the do-do, it costs way too much and, it can end up alienating developers (here's looking at you Cell). Both companies will most likely look to source something from AMD or Intel on the CPU side and AMD or Nvidia on the GPU side, with VIA being the wild card for the CPU. I'm willing to bet either a Nvidia TEGRA like design or a AMD APU.
• Standard Large Storage - With digital downloads starting to gain traction in the console arena more than likely we'll see storage drives (I say storage drives and not HDD's because they may use SSD's) that are over 500GB.
• Adequate amount of memory - The biggest complaint from developers this generation (outside of difficult to program hardware) was the lack of sufficient memory. Even for a closed system with low overhead like the consoles, 256-512MB of memory was hardly enough. It shows in most games having to be designed with those restraints. It's likely we'll see at least 6GB (2GB for the GPU and 4GB for the system or a pool shared is probable) in each system. What will be interesting is the type used and how it is actually set up.
• Less heat/lower power - YLOD/RROD need I say more?
• A cheap model - The 4gb 360 seems to be working, not to mention even Nintendo released a cheaper stripped down version of the Wii. As is the case with this gen, the next gen consoles will be serving double duty as media servers/streamers. It's probable to give consumers who simply want to watch some movies and play the games. The people who don't want to spend $300-400 on a game console. Chances are it'll have less storage and stripped down functionality and probably hit at a $100-200 range. Doubtful it'll be at launch, though it should come soon after.
• Support for multitasking and apps - something carried over and expanded from this gen.
• Voice control/Motion control - see above

 

So just some thoughts on what we will see next generation, which will hopefully be announced soon. Who knows we may even get a huge surprise.