A Look Ahead: Consoles

by Gerry Block

The history of gaming consoles is long and fabled. From the early travails of the first home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey in the early 1970s, to the industry crashes in 1977 and 1983, to resurrection in 1985 and the 5 successive generations of console battles that have followed, the story is anything but boring. After a degree of stability was reached thanks to the NES in the mid-80s, a loose 5-year hardware cycle took root in the videogame industry. Spurred by the dream of owning the dominant platform in each console generation, historic heavyweights like Atari, Nintendo, and Sega, as well as more recent titans like Sony and Microsoft have invested billions in developing increasingly powerful and feature rich hardware. Today, a three-way battle rages between the 1.5-year old Microsoft Xbox 360 and newer Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. Though each console is still quite early in its lifespan, the successors to each are undoubtedly already on the drawing boards. Over the many generations of console wars that have gone down in history, the industry has proven itself both adventurous and highly reactionary. As such, when looking forward to the future of gaming consoles to come, the reality of what will eventually be released will likely be dictated as much by what proves successful in the current generation as what is available via technologic progress. To offer insight in what the future of console gaming holds, we offer our analysis and predictions for various aspects of what a 2010 future-console may contain.

Media Storage
Today, the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war is still developing, and neither format seems ready to give in. By 2010, or thereabouts, there may well be a resolution that will dictate which of the optical formats it will be sensible to employ. Hardware cost for each, or the winner, will likely be quite low by this time, which will make an inclusion of the technology in a console more a matter of compatibility than a true feature. Unlike previous generations, however, physical media will likely not be the primary mechanism of content distribution for the next round of consoles. Digital distribution is the future, and is in fact already in place. Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace is offering both game and movie downloads today, and as increasingly fast broadband internet becomes ubiquitous and storage-cost on hard drives negligible, physical media will fall into decline. As such, expect all of the future-consoles to feature large hard drives for saving downloaded content. By 2010 it's likely that drives capable of hundreds of gigabytes, if not a terabyte or more, will be cost efficient enough to include in videogame consoles.

Hardware Features
In that it's unlikely that any of the future-consoles will aim to exist without the support of the internet, built-in Wi-Fi (probably 802.11n) will likely be an ubiquitous hardware feature. Supporting devices like digital cameras, handheld gaming platforms, and even credit cards are beginning to incorporate Wi-Fi features, which will hopefully lead to wireless convergence among them all by 2010. The manufacturers of gaming consoles have always hoped to capture the position of living-room media hub, and will likely aim to incorporate as much of this new technology as possible in addition to offering media-sharing capabilities similar to, and hopefully even better than, the Media Center Extender functionality of the Xbox 360 and media-hub features of the PlayStation 3, More than 25% of American homes now own HDTVs, and projections indicate we'll reach 50% and more long before 2010. As such, the future-consoles will likely all make HDMI their primary video-output, though we suspect legacy formats will also be supported through at least the next-generation of consoles.

Hardware Processing Power
Prior to the Nintendo Wii, the primary selling point of each and every new gaming console has been the promise of better graphics and more realistic games. Over the roughly 20 years since console gaming became truly established, we've progressed from pixilated models with little to no animation to our current generation of hardware that increasingly nears photo-real quality. Were it not for the recent, but so far unabated, massive enthusiasm for the Nintendo Wii, predicting yet more development of console processing power would be a no-brainer. However, if, and that's a big if, the current sales trends continue, hardware manufacturers may well aim lower in packing processing power into the next generation machines. Limiting hardware cost may become one of, if not the, major focuses in console design in reaction to the popularity of the cheap ($250) Wii and the struggles of the extremely powerful, but expensive ($600) PlayStation 3. Rather than aiming for the stars as Sony did in designing the 9-core Cell Processor, Microsoft and Nintendo's strategy of building consoles from roughly off-the-shelf components derived from PC-technology will likely be employed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the strong graphical performance of the Xbox 360 demonstrates today. Nevertheless, such design necessitates that the conceptual future-consoles rely on hardware that is superseded in the PC space by the time the console actually sees the light of day.As such, a future-console intended for a 2010 release will likely share similarities with high-end PC gaming components released in late 2008 or 2009. Multi-core CPUs will be a given, though we'd guess we won't see more than 4-cores unless proprietary chips are designed. Multi-core GPUs are a possibility as well, though rumor suggests ATI's next major platform, the R700, will follow a route of multi-chips instead of multi-cores. Most exciting from the hardware point of view, however, will be the likely addition of dedicated physics processors or processor-cores dedicated to the task. The physics trend, which is in its infancy in PC gaming today, will likely be the next big graphical feature to follow up the "HD-generation" of consoles now on the market. Though games of today feature some real-time physics, with strong hardware support and developer familiarity that will develop by 2010 the future-consoles will likely be showcasing the fully-destructible worlds and true cloth and liquid physics modeling that are making games like Crysis the darlings of the current PC gaming industry.

Controllers
The reactionary quality of the gaming industry was blatantly revealed at E3 2006 when it became known that Sony, in response to the massive enthusiasm the Nintendo Wii's motion-based controller was generating, decided to add tilt-sensitivity to the PS3's SIXAXIS just weeks before the show. With Nintendo now the darling of the 'average-gamer' and reaping great benefits, it's not improbable that each and every future-console will make some form of motion-sensing a key element in its control interface. While we don't expect Nintendo competitors to abandon 'hardcore' controllers in favor of Wiimote like sticks, Wii-like pointing functionality will be assured.

Online Networks
The already-established console networks like Xbox Live and the PlayStation Store will develop and expand in new ways. The potential of leveraging a videogame console as a portal for digital content distribution will be great by 2010, which will mean such networks will expand the breadth of content they provide dramatically. IPTV (essentially cable-TV transmitted via the internet) is another avenue of content distribution that will likely be embraced by future-consoles, and, in fact, Microsoft is already demonstrating the Xbox 360's capabilities in this regard.

Conclusion
The combination of these various elements will likely be future-consoles rather akin to what is available now, simply more powerful and feature rich. Physics, in our estimation, will be the greatest graphical improvement leveraged by the next round of consoles, though software lighting effects like HDR, currently available only to high-end PC gamers, will also make an impact. The true avenue for exciting new capabilities in the next generation, we believe, will be the possibilities provided by digital distribution and IPTV. The gaming consoles of today have already established their utility in this regard, and as the paradigm develops in the coming years, it's likely few other hardware platforms will be able to match their accessibility and installation base.