According to EA executive vice president and chief technical officer Rajat Teneja, the next consoles (Xbox One and PS4) are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market.
“These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics.”
Teneja stated that the introduction of the next-gen consoles to the market will be as groundbreaking and profound as the introduction of smartphones or Facebook, and that it will be an inflection point in the history of the industry.
He also stressed the importance of cloud services and storage to the future of the gaming industry.
“The power of connected data is going to be an integral part of the gaming experience,” he said. “We see 2.5bn monthly game sessions and 50 [terabytes] of daily telemetry data on our network alone. The Xbox Live network required 500 servers when it launched a decade ago and as was mentioned yesterday, they are now provisioning 300,000 servers to handle Xbox data in the cloud. That growth is staggering, but it also means we’ll really start to see more examples of true cross-device play.”
This statement comes in the wake of the confirmation that EA will support current consoles until 2017; EA CFO Blake Jorgensen revealed EA’s support during the Stifel 2013 Technology Conference.
The games industry is clearly moving towards cloud storage–the fact that Microsoft increased the number of servers to 300,000 is proof that the trend is there and that connected data is part of the future, but saying that the next consoles’ architecture bests current PC hardware is a little too idealistic.
There is no comparison between a static device such as an Xbox and a customizable PC that can be adapted to your needs. The PC gaming market is experiencing a boost since the introduction of digital distribution, the free-to-play model is thriving and the popularity of E-sports is booming. I don’t know how consoles could ever outperform PCs since a PC is, in essence, upgradable and can keep up with the advances in hardware development–which is why there will eventually be a gap between consoles and PC.
Yes, the new consoles are a big improvement; they will allow developers to create better games and they will provide more leeway to developers in terms of hardware capabilities… but I don’t think they will surpass the power of PCs.
