Are we seeing the end of gaming consoles as we know them? That might be the case, according to some industry experts and analysts, that are seeing how our gaming trends are heading. Former PlayStation exec Shawn Layden certainly believes that Xbox might even be bowing out of the console game.
“Watching what Xbox has been doing recently, I do get Dreamcast flashbacks,” Layden told Gamesindustry.biz. “I think Sega realised they just were better off being a software house. I think Microsoft is in that same sort of fork in the road. And I don’t think their hardware offering is persuasive enough to make up the ground they’ve lost.”
Overall, Layden sees consoles as a declining market, but he does think there are ways to bring them back to the forefront of gaming. “We need to get more people, not just more money,” he said. “I think we’ve plateaued on the tech, frankly. How many of us can really tell the difference between 90 frames per second and 120 frames per second? Make it cheaper and simpler. Let’s do that instead. And let’s find a way to have more hardware companies participate.”
Layden also wants to see more tech companies enter the console game, hoping that the format for consoles could be the same so that the gaming “wars” would only be about content, not hardware.
What do you think of Layden’s takes?