HiGame

There’s a rumor making the rounds that AMD is prepping new solutions for Sony and Microsoft with an estimated 2018 release date and up to 5x improved performance-per-watt. Sony and Microsoft haven’t said much about these plans (and won’t, to avoid cannibalizing sales of existing platforms), but that doesn’t stop us from examining them. Could we see new hardware in-market by that date?

We could — but there are significant questions about how the market would react to it. If you plot game console releases over time, the Xbox 360 and PS3 were clear outliers, at eight years and seven years, respectively. The historical trend going back to the original Nintendo NES has been a 4-6 year cadence. The problem with a release cycle this fast, however, is that game development cycles now take longer than they used to, and you run the risk of alienating gamers who dropped significant cash on a platform they thought would last as long as the Xbox 360 / PS3 cycle did.

The other major question is one of technology. In the past, console technology tended to leap forward relatively quickly — compare the evolution of Lara Croft from her earliest appearance on the PlayStation to the 2013 title, Tomb Raider.

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