Twitch CEO expects phone-style upgrade cycles for home consoles
Emmet Smear, the CEO of game streaming service Twitch has been speculating on the future of the home games console – and has come up with a rather interesting prediction of where consoles could be going in the future.
Speaking to The Guardian, Smear suggests consoles could go the way of phones – with new upgrades coming every year:
“They’re going to have to change form,” he said. “You can already see this on both Xbox and PlayStation where there’s a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games. This is the first step toward being able to iterate the hardware platform. I could imagine a version 1.1 product from both Microsoft and Sony which adds in slightly more speed and slightly more memory very similar to how phones and tablets work today. I think it’s going to look more like the mobile phone market over time.”
Its an intriguing perspective, and one we can easily imagine – with progressive more incremental, meaning that whilst you can still probably wait and only upgrade every few years, eventually for each app or software update there will be an inevitable cut off point – a bit like the iPhone 4S can run iOS8, but the iPhone 4 can’t, or how some day the iPhone 6 will be left behind when iOS12 comes out.
The upshot for the likes of Sony and Microsoft is that not only would they get to potentially sell you a console more regularly, but graphics and performance would be more readily able to compete with the PC market.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
