Because I know how much everyone here cares about video game technology and being marketed to I decided to make this very timely and newsworthy video game technology marketing thread. Sisbros, brace yourselves, the next Xbox has been partially unveiled. Digital Foundry and Eurogamer have the megaton scoop for all the obvious reasons and while no one’s saying what it’s officially called yet or what it looks like they are definitely talking about what’s inside it.
Basically lots of words and pictures about how it’s a better Xbox than the previous ones. To be serious for a moment I do like the talk of compatibility and greater performance for older games (even backwards compatible 360 games) and it’ll be interesting to see how “native 4K” games look and run compared to PS4 Pro’s upscaled 1800p games.
If you have a tv with 8 million pixels it’s going to be bangin’ likewise if you have a tv with just a million pixels you’re going to get the option to downsample for super duper antialiasing, which Sony leaves up to the developer but Microsoft is making mandatory.
I don’t know if hype is the word to describe it but it is another Next Big Thing.
The increased performance in old games is interesting and what I expected of the PS4 Pro before I got learned. But then one of the articles has a side by side of Project Cars with a 5 fps increase.
Yeah the Project Cars shot is from a video comparing the improvement from an Xbox One to a One S. But you have a point in that the increased performance in older games will likely be marginal and not mindblowing.
with all the new power of this highly advanced technology you can now play all the sick xbone games in super vision, like that one game and I dunno probably one other maybe
you realize it won’t have a cool name because our specific brand of boring then gets filtered through marketing into a boring that Middle America will want to buy
of course, they’ll end up calling it the Scorpio anyway to spite me and also maybe because that’s all they’ve called it at this point, even in its sole public appearance
I ended up getting one of those Elite controllers and it’s great if you like your analog sticks to feel like smooth baby bottoms
Seriously it’s definitely twice the build quality of yer standard first-party controllers and if it lasts twice as long (I always get ‘gritty’ analog sticks because the column wears against the ring and I hates it) I’ll be very happy. The paddles also solve A-to-run games where I need right-stick control, I just map A button to squeeze.
Yeah, I highly recommend it if you can swing it and care about it.
I’ve had it for 8 months and made one minor fix, stuffing some cotton in the analog stick bowl so to tighten it (it rattled a little which didn’t affect performance but was noticeably not correct). My only minor complaint is the metal triggers, which feel great on my skin but are noticeably harder than plastic when I squeeze them in a racing game.
It’s a heavy boy, too. The rubber texture is grippy without being sweaty.
The dpad is reasonable and their goofy circle pad swapout is handy for shmups through emulators (I mainly use this on PC) (oh wait duh I only use it on PC, I don’t have an Xbox One)
I guess…the CPU/GPU is surrounded by aluminum which wicks heat up to a big copper plate, which conducts it to…a massive aluminum grill, under…an aluminum and steel fan the size of a desk fan? And the copy on the Scorpio website says it’s “liquid cooled” somehow?
Jesus.
So this thing is gonna be, like, a gurgling jet engine that can render 256 4-dimensional “cubes” ramming into each other to create a 1:1 simulation of a black hole. Got it.
Huh. I wonder if it will turn out that jamming a bunch of Scorpios together like Raspberry Pi’s makes a cost-effective super computer to render fluid dynamics, or something?
Microsoft as a whole has basically positioned Holo Lens as a pillar of their future-facing strategy, and a belief that VR might overnight become the defacto future seems like the only gamble that could justify building, marketing, and selling this thing, other than the wishy-washy concepts of being an industry leader with a branch that I’m pretty sure has done nothing but lose billions.
Edit: Oh wait: Holo Lens is a self-contained thing. I guess MS’s play is to be generally ready for VR, and to just let whoever jump on board the platform.
modern GPUs are super duper parallel by design, though it’s very hard to get SLI drivers right for heterogeneous setups on PC, but any marketing copy that says “100’s of X” is stating the obvious.
Actually, I’m now really curious about what the longtail profit on this is supposed to be.
I mean, this is basically an enthusiast/luxury product. It will not sell en masse. To make money on something that is designed to be sold at low volume, you need to have high margins on something that already costs a lot to make. But…video game consoles have been “lose money on the handle, make crazy margin on the blades” model since the PSX entered the game.
But.
I would guess that Xbox is not planning to charge a higher licensing fee for graphics intensive games with the expectation that companies will either swallow it or pass it on to the consumer. I also don’t think they’re planning on charging for some kind of middleware or access to rendering farms (though that might be kind of smart synergy).
So…how do they plan to make money?
My only guess is that the plan is for it to be a loss leader for VR, which–put that simply–is too dumb to actually be the case. So I dunno. I kind of wish press reported that kind of stuff. Bloomberg, Forbes, what are you actually supposed to be doing?
