The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles suggest the future of the game with six years late

Both Sony and Microsoft set the expectations for their future game consoles, revealing information about new hardware at 24-hour intervals. Sony has revealed that its nameless console next-gen would be based on AMD, support high-end graphics features such as ray tracing and 8K output, and switch to high-speed SSD storage. Microsoft then announced the announcement of the Xbox One S, a late addition to the Xbox One line that finally gives up the optical drive.

The next PlayStation and the next Xbox (the future model beyond the One S) are expected next year. A reading of the tea leaves is that one or both of them can drop old optical disk drives and traditional hard disk drives for a combination of cloud streaming games and download only.

Currently, Sony's Mark Cerny tells Wired that the next-generation PlayStation will still be able to use physical media. This could mean optical disks, but could also be a kind of removable flash drive (or maybe optical disks only for playing older and backwards compatible game disks). But there is a long time between now and the holiday season of 2020.

If all this sounds familiar, there are several reasons. Almost all other mainstream entertainment devices have long since abandoned optical drives and non-SSD storage, and cloud games finally has its hour of glory in the sun, after years of false starts, thanks to Google stadiums project, Microsoft Project xCloud, Nvidia's GeForce Now and other streaming options.

It also looks a lot like the console revolution I called in 2013, just before the launch of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In an article, I boldly suggested: "Why Xbox One and PS4 may be the latest generation of consoles. "

Even at the time, media broadcasting was done online and away from physical products. On PS4 and Xbox One, I said:

"The two new consoles seem to be heavy dinosaurs, a return to a time when your hardware, software and processing power were all housed on site, in a localized package." However, since the launch of the previous generation of consoles Five years ago, we opted for a much more connected way to access content, primarily through cloud services that can broadcast video and game content, as well as interactive experiences. live, such as shopping and social networks. "

My goal was to express my disappointment that these devices are not more geared towards the future. At the time, Microsoft even had the idea of ​​combining physical disk and digital games into a single-user license for easier portability, but it gave way when gamers criticized the inability to resell game discs Used. This portability is basically what you have now when you buy a game via Steam or via the digital showcase built into a console.

However, a certain percentage of the games are still on fragile physical disks, which are easy to lose and require a lot of complex moving parts of mechanical equipment, at a time when almost all other consumer electronic products, streaming media boxes to iPad, have virtually no moving parts inside.

I thought the new 2013 consoles should be built the same way. But even if they were not, I was convinced that the next turn would be.

"The end result: the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox, uh, two (?) Are more likely to look like a Roku or an Apple TV than a gigantic gaming computer … I think I'm crazy Let's go into four In six years, we'll see what the next wave of appliances and gaming services will look like.If we're considering larger black boxes brimming with silicon, I'll be happy to eat my words . "

Well, it's six years later. And while not sure, early indications of the next generation of consoles are promising, at least in theory. But, I was wrong before.

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