[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

With the next generation of consoles coming around the corner it rises the question of Will people upgrade their consoles? Personally I think the Xbox 720 (Talking about the 720 since I don't know a lot about Ps3/Wii-u) is a huge no. Honestly just think of the price of it. Currently the newest lines of xbox's go for about $300 (USD). And that's with a 10MB GPU, 512MB of RAM, and a 3-cored CPU @3.2GHz. Hardware speaking this should be worth about 100 at most considering the HDD, Optical Drive, and other components. So this raises the question of the price tag on the 720, which will have 8GB of RAM and a 8 Core processor. Which those two things alone can cost $200+, so we can expect a ridiculous price tag.

With the high price and good specs it really makes me think, how different will the 720 be from a Gaming Computer? Obviously a PC has a lot more to offer than a console, one key role is that the PC is upgradeable and with the right motherboard can be upgraded for a handful of years, where as a console get outdated within a year or two. And considering the fact that you can run a endless supply of apps on a PC whereas on a xbox, you can really only play games. Therefore if the xbox is anywhere near $500 a PC would probably be a better way to spend you money.

But as we all know consoles aren't the only ones evolving. There is on key to PC's that can make a PC better than a xbox, even with a price tag of $100. And that key is OnLive. As some people may know OnLive is a game streaming service. Meaning all you need to play games is a computer and an internet connection, in fact you don't even need a computer since you could play on your iPad. But none of the less this means that you can play AAA titles on almost any PC, but right now the only flaw of OnLive is the fact that it is not that popular therefore big developers are not that interested. But this brings me to my next point.

Also as some of you may know there is a new console coming out call the Ouya. It's really more like a PC considering it is made to be hacked and you could do endless things on it and you can upgrade the hardware. But the real zinger with the Ouya is that it's only $100. And not only will it be able to play most AAA titles with the default hardware but it also supports OnLive. And since the official Ouya kickstarter got 63,000 backers, it is safe to say that this console will be pretty popular. And since it will support OnLive maybe we can expect it to grow and maybe we will see Game streaming overcome all consoles and regular PC gaming. But only time will tell.

Finally is the fact that how much more change can consoles under-go. So far for the past couple of generations we've all seen the same controllers and the same basic game-play (Excluding Wii) and most of the revolutionary updates have been either Software or Add-ons (Ie. Kinect) so will there ever be a point in time where consoles will just reach the limit and can't get further Harware upgrades without the price tag sky-rocketing? Again, only time will tell.


What do you guys think?