Twitch TV boss Emmett Shear has predicted that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will be the final dedicated games consoles on the market.
Speaking at the Changing Media Summit in London this week, Emmett feels the traditional console cycle will give way to top-set boxes after Sony and Microsoft’s current-generation machines have had their day.
“The problem is, the seven-year upgrade lifecycle doesn’t work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform,” he told The Guardian. “It’s so intrinsically built into how consoles get manufactured and made and the full business model, that I’d be surprised to see another generation.”
They’re going to have to change form. You can already see this on both Xbox and PlayStation where there’s a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games. This is the first step toward being able to iterate the hardware platform. I could imagine a version 1.1 product from both Microsoft and Sony which adds in slightly more speed and slightly more memory very similar to how phones and tablets work today. I think it’s going to look more like the mobile phone market over time.”
Despite this, Emmett was quick to praise the PS4 and Xbox One for their successful implementation of Twitch TV.
“The consoles have been huge for us – they drive a tonne of broadcasting,” he said. “We’ve seen the rise of a few games that have done very well because of consoles, notably Fifa and Call of Duty. The top end of broadcasting still tends to come from PC – if you want to produce high-end content you want more than is going to be prepared for you in any off the shelf set-up, but it’s gotten a lot of people started in broadcasting and that’s really important. It’s been a smashing success as far as integrations go.
We approached monetisation completely differently. We established the partners program to enable anyone who was really successful to make money on our site, and that was huge for fuelling our growth.
We’re probably the only video website on the internet where people actually remind broadcasters to run ads. They say: ‘Hey, you’re not going to make money, what are you doing?!’ It’s that sense of community that drives Twitch, and it’s the same sentiment thats behind the rise of Kickstarter – it’s the democratisation of media in a way that enables everyone to be a patreon now. It’s not just about a few rich people choosing to support the media they want, it can be done in a democratised, distributed way. That’s really exciting.”
Do you think PS4 will be the last of its kind? Let us know in the comments section below.