It's astonishing how much expectations are being lowered for the next Xbox.
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Join the club for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation, and sign you up to our newsletter. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsthat its own AI ambitions are helping cause, Microsoft does not know how to sell a new Xbox that feels cutting-edge at a price that regular people can afford.
What the console business needs is"new business models" rather than"just the most premium, high-performance console in the world," Sharma said.
"I think we've reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation," she said. "So I think we will see radically different business models that we never expected come into orbit later this year. " It's an astonishing place we're in.
Consumer devices always involve compromises for the sake of affordability, but this is the first time I can remember a tech company lowering expectations for its next big gadget so dramatically. Sharma went on to say that Microsoft will"have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward.
" "We will have to apply new techniques so that we can compress ," the Xbox CEO said. "We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device.
"Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. , with no specific plan laid out to solve it. Sharma did present outlines of ideas in the interview, but Xbox has already done"flexible storage options," and what it means to"empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device" is anyone's guess. Another guess is that we're talking about cloud streaming. It's not a strictly new—RIP Stadia—but it fits in well with big tech's AI obsession. At a GDC session I attended in March,DLSS pioneer Bryan Catanzaro said that"AI is fundamentally much more efficient in the cloud.
" That's a useful premise if you want to move toward a world where games are served like Netflix shows and at-home devices can get by with less RAM and SSD space. For now, it's clear that Microsoft is still trying to figure out what to do about this self-inflicted problem.
"We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix," Sharma wrote in the letter. It'd be funnier that Microsoft is doing this to itself if it weren't screwing up everything else, too.
Valve still hasn't told us what itsI have no doubt that PC gamers will find a way to keep doing what we do, but there may be a long cold winter ahead, so safeguard that DDR5. Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs.
He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call"boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade . Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.
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