Speaking recently to the Guardian, Shear supported his statement. “The seven-year upgrade lifecycle doesn’t work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform,” said Shear. “It’s so intrinsically built into how consoles get manufactured and made and the full business model, that I’d be surprised to see another generation.”
According to Shear, consoles are like set-top boxes and have a short lifetime. “You can already see this on both Xbox and PlayStation where there’s a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games. This is the first step toward being able to iterate the hardware platform. I could imagine a version 1.1 product from both Microsoft and Sony which adds in slightly more speed and slightly more memory very similar to how phones and tablets work today. I think it’s going to look more like the mobile phone market over time.”
We will have to wait and see if what Shear says comes true or not. In recent times however, we’ve seen consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo become more flexible in what they’re used for in recent generations. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and other media functionality have become hotspots for selling hardware. Neither Microsoft nor Sony has indicated their intentions to make new consoles. Nintendo on the other hand continues to stick to the hardware game.
The company recently announced the Nintendo NX alongside their new initiative to make mobile games, so consoles might not be dying off as Shear believes.
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