What is the future of consoles? Will it be like the PC where it will keep growing stronger and more powerful with every build? Or will it hit a point where maybe consoles are no longer necessary? We’ve seen execs from the likes of NVIDIA and Ubisoft who thinks that maybe consoles could be replaced one day.Now it looks like Microsoft seems to think the way we look at consoles is changing as well. During an interview with Engadget, Microsoft’s head of Xbox games marketing Aaron Greenberg seemed to suggest that this generation’s Xbox One could very well be the last. “I think it is. … For us, we think the future is without console generations; we think that the ability to build a library, a community, to be able to iterate with the hardware — we’re making a pretty big bet on that with Project Scorpio.”
He adds, “We’re basically saying, ‘This isn’t a new generation; everything you have continues forward and it works.’ We think of this as a family of devices.” Note that this doesn’t mean that the Xbox is done after Project Scorpio. If anything it sounds like Microsoft could be done with generations, like having huge 7-10 year gaps between releases, and that more frequent hardware updates could be introduced instead.
It is unclear if this is the direction that Sony will be taking as well, but given that Project Scorpio and the PS4 Neo were announced at roughly the same time, it shouldn’t be surprising if they were to go down the same path.