Next-gen. consoles...any guesses?

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
Your missing the point. An upgrade path would be ideal. Sega had the right idea with the upgrade path. Whether the upgrades were good or not is not the point I was trying to make. We can upgrade our PCs with a $150 video card every few years, why not for the console market? If a 150 buck upgrade for an upgradable console would yield the then next-gen capabilities would you not opt for that rather than dropping another 500 bucks on a completely new console? I definately would.

We already have something like this. The Wii is capable of playing Game Cube games, PS3 does PS2, and Xbox 360 does Xbox.

Game Cube (2002) - Wii (2006) = 4 years
PS2 (1999) - PS3 (2006) = 7 years
Xbox (2001) - Xbox 360 (2005) = 4 years

Buying a $400 console every 4 years is actually a good deal, compared to computers. 4 years ago Anandtech was looking at the ~3GHz range of CPUs. If you did the $200 upgrade every few years as you suggested, it means that right now you would have an Athlon 3200+, like I had, but with a GeForce 8800GT. That's a nice video card, but games like Quake 4 or Crysis or any other new game would still run like shit in a system like that.

This huge cost difference is why I'll probably never upgrade my current computer, and just ride it out until the Xbox 3 comes out in maybe November 2010-2011 (these consoles always come out in November). My dad has been using the same $1000 computer for the past 6 years, and it still runs great. In that same time I've probably spent over $3000 on gaming computer parts.