Microsoft sees a future without console generations

Xbox One and PS4 will be the last of their kind, Xbox’s US marketing boss Aaron Greenberg has predicted.

Next year’s arrival of the iterative Xbox Scorpio and PS4 Neo upgrades – as well as Microsoft’s growing unification of the Xbox and Windows space – all point to a shift away from the traditional console upgrade model toward something more akin to the more regular hardware updates seen in the smartphone and PC markets.

For us, we think the future is without console generations,” Greenberg told Engadget. We think that the ability to build a library, a community, to be able to iterate with the hardware – we’re making a pretty big bet on that with Project Scorpio.

We’re basically saying, ‘This isn’t a new generation; everything you have continues forward and it works.’ We think of this as a family of devices. But we’ll see. We’re going to learn from this, we’re going to see how that goes.

So far I’d say, based on the reaction, there appears to be a lot of demand and interest around Project Scorpio, and we think it’s going to be a pretty big success. If the games and the content deliver, which I think they will do, I think it will change the way we think about the future of console gaming.”

Greenberg is hardly alone with such predictions. Sony has made similar noises, as have other industry bodies such as Twitch. These predictions aren’t new, either. In 2011 then EA boss John Riccitiello said the console cycle as we knew it was gone forever”, while as far back as 2008 then THQ boss Brian Farrell predicted a move to console sub-cycles.