Microsoft were actually quite explicit about this, back when they first started marketing the XBox One: the focus was not on games, but rather on controlling all media consumption in your living room. Your XBOne would be able to "drive" any device you connected to it, including your XBox360, or even your PS3 or PS4. It would always be on; it would always be watching and listening, alert for anything which looked like an expressed desire that it spring into action. Kinect was a key part of the package, but second-hand games, or games as commodities period (rather than services)? Not part of the plan.
They back-pedalled very quickly, of course, but the damage was done: Sony's PS4 has far outsold XBOne. So it wasn't any surprise when Microsoft officially threw in the towel:
Here's the thing, though -- Sony's apparently not too far behind:During a press event in San Francisco last week, Spencer said that the Universal Windows Platform, a common development platform that allows apps to run across PC, Xbox, tablets and smartphones, would be central to the company’s gaming strategy. “That is our focus going forward,” he told reporters. “Building out a complete gaming ecosystem for Universal Windows Applications.”This is, he explained, the culmination of the company’s vision over the past year. In January 2015, Microsoft announced that it was bringing an Xbox app to Windows 10 PCs, allowing cross-platform play and a cohesive friends list across both platforms. Then, in November, the Xbox One was updated to be compatible with Windows 10, bringing a new interface and features to the console. In late-January, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told attendees at the dotNet conference in Madrid that UWAs would be coming to Xbox One, but did not specify in what capacity.Now it seems Microsoft’s plan is to shift the entire development model towards universal applications that run across PC and console – indeed any machine that’s compatible with the Universal Windows Platform. This could have radical implications for the console model, which so far has always been based on the idea that the hardware has to remain largely unchanged throughout the machine’s lifespan.
The core element of the console gaming experience is the console itself: the whole point is that the performance of the box isn't supposed to change. That was the key element that distinguishes a console from a PC as a gaming rig: PCs changed all the time, but consoles were stable.Sony is currently planning a new version of the PS4 with increased graphical power and games running at 4K resolution, developer sources tell Kotaku.We don’t know whether current PS4 owners will be able to upgrade or if they will have to buy an entirely new device to benefit from this power boost, but from what we hear, Sony has started briefing developers.Based on conversations with developers who have spoken with Sony, this ‘PS4.5’ will include an upgraded GPU both to support high-end 4K resolution for games and add more processing power that can enhance the games supported by PlayStation VR, the headset Sony will launch this spring. It’s unclear if ‘PS4.5’ is an official name or just a nickname that developers have been using. One developer jokingly called it the ‘PS4K’ while telling me about the device.
But you know what: the PC part of that? It's changing, too -- to become more stable:
The cost of PC gaming isn't going to be an obstacle anymore -- a mid-range system of two years ago is still mid-range, and will still be mid-range two years from now. No wonder the PS4 and XBOne are trying to close some of that gap.Intel has said that new technologies in chip manufacturing will favour better energy consumption over faster execution times – effectively calling an end to ‘Moore’s Law’, which successfully predicted the doubling of density in integrated circuits, and therefore speed, every two years. [...] The prognosis comes from William Holt, Intel’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of its Technology and Manufacturing Group, speaking at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, and discussing the new technologies – such as tunnelling transistors (or ‘Quantum tunnelling’) and spintronics – which will define the next stages of evolution in computing.
And all that's before we start looking at the issue of console exclusive titles (or, rather, the lack of them in gen8), the rise of mobile platforms like iOS and Android, and the resulting boom in cross-platform development. Games just aren't made exclusively for any one platform anymore, not unless the console maker is paying for development.
And then there's VALVe. Gabe Newell was not at all happy with Microsoft's "walled garden" vision of how PC customers would buy and install programs, and has been hard at work developing SteamOS (a.k.a. Linux) which could serve as an alternative to Windows. And Linux gamers have recently had a lot of help in building up their platform: AMD/Radeon and Intel/NVidia are also working hard to bring support for their hardware to Linux, and a quick filtering of Steam for SteamOS/Linux titles pulls up thousands of them.
Since the PS4 is also basically a media center PC (and also basically running on Linux), the announcement that Microsoft is basically throwing in the towel on the whole console model for gaming, in order to embrace PCs again, should mean the death of the console model for gaming. All that remains to be seen now is whether Sony's and VALVe's embrace of Unix/Linux and the current trend towards cross-platform development will actually be enough to kibosh Microsoft's attempt to take back control of PC gaming with UWP.
It won't happen overnight (Sony only just stopped making Betamax tapes last year, so they'll likely keep making PS-branded boxes for a long time), but unless Nintendo's NX platform is something really revolutionary, it would seem that the PC model has emerged as the clearly dominant one for gaming... even in the living room.