Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you followed Microsoft’s E3 announcements yesterday?  It was pretty good right?  We got news about cross platform play, Gears of War 4 will ship later this year, Xbox Club is shaping up to be a way to form online guilds and we got not only one but 2 console announcements.  We have the Xbox One S  coming later this year which will be a slimmed down version of the big black box that occupies our gaming space and…Microsoft ever so deftly and quietly made it obsolete with Project Scorpio.  Many of us “ooo’ed” and “aaaaah’ed” at Project Scorpio as the specs were announced:

Project Scorpio apparently contains 8-core CPU and a graphics card with 6TFLOPs (trillion floating point operations per second) of power. It’ll also have 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. In English it means that it supposedly can go toe to toe with the latest Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 PC offerings.  If you really want the nitty gritty of the specs, go here.

Apparently, it’s also VR ready as you will need a powerful machine to run some of the VR games that have so far been announced not to mention it will also be 4K capable.  Not just 4K video capable but 4K game capable as well.

This sounds like a winning situation right?   Not so fast. Gamers, let’s think about this for a hard moment.  No matter how much Microsoft or the gaming industry at large wants us to believe that this is supposedly an updated Xbox One, let’s call it what it really is.

Project Scorpio is a new gaming platform. 

Microsoft has preemptively thrown in the towel on this generation of consoles and is feverishly working on getting ahead of Sony and Nintendo to be out of the door with the next new shiny box.  Although Sony made no mentions about their ‘upgraded’ console code-named ‘Neo’ at this year’s E3, you can bet that with Microsoft throwing down the gauntlet as it were, Sony’s next new box will have specs to compare with whatever Microsoft has. Honestly, after rumors started coming out earlier this year that Sony had something in the works as far as an upgraded console, it forced Microsoft to act and this why we have this announcement.

Again, Microsoft assures us as consumers not to worry as they will make sure that current gen owners will be taken care of.  Are we really buying that?  For everyone reading right now, if you bought a new console within the last 3 years, please mentally raise your hand. Mentally, I see a lot of people.   Let’s remember, that when new consoles come out, it has to sell based on the developers being able to make games for it.   Within the last 5 years, developers squeezed all that they could from the Xbox 360 and PS3, just started getting into a groove with the Xbox One and PS4 and in less than 5 years, they are going to be tasked to start making games for a new box.  So is anyone surprised that supposedly 62% of last year’s games announced have yet to be released?  I may be wrong but let’s consider this:  Why pour a ton of resources into making a game for a box that will be obsolete in another year or 2?

Now coming back to the consumer end of things, especially for those that haven’t invested in one yet, let’s ask the simple question.  Why pay $300 for a gaming system when an improved version is coming within the next year? Now, I am sure that a lot of you may say that’s just how things go but let’s look at our immediate circle of friends and associates.  Many of us took our time getting into this current generation of systems because not only were there still good games coming out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 but with such a long turnaround time in console refreshes, many were waiting for the systems to not only go down in price but be fully functional and mostly bug-free after a few years on the market. Even within my own circle, I have a lot of friends who just recently bought new systems. I can only imagine how they may feel right now that they probably should have held out another year or so.   In short, we were expecting another long period of console ownership.

Another question is, what will Project Scorpio’s announcement mean for Nintendo’s NX system?  At the time of this writing, the system nor the specs have yet to be announced, but the conundrum is that Nintendo’s new system in my opinion, has to be on par with what is coming in the next few years to stay competitive.  I am sorry Nintendo fans, anything specs-wise that compares it to current gen gaming will not cut it.  Let’s be honest, in the last 15 years, Nintendo’s way of doing things have not always bode well.  For example, the N64 was using cartridges long after other companies moved on to disks,  the Wii, while wildly popular and a huge seller for the first 3 years of life was vastly under-powered and the Wii U at the stage in which it was released, failed to bring in developers.  Nintendo cannot continue using the same practices if they expect to entice not only gamers but 3^rd party developers as well.  Look at what I mentioned earlier, developers will not want to split resources between so many different systems.   Think about it like this: Call of Duty fans, how did your experience differ between playing on the Xbox 360/PS3 vs the Wii?   Dividing so many resources among systems for one game always means that features are going to get lost.  Thus whatever Nintendo brings forth today means that it has to compete with what’s coming down the road, not what’s current. If VR is going to be the next big thing in gaming, I currently have little hope that Nintendo’s system will be ready to compete with whatever Microsoft and Sony have planned in the coming years.

The last point is that of price.  I am going to predict that $600 will be the entry point for whatever Project Scorpio’s final version will be.  That is going to be a hard pill to swallow after many of us recently forked over anywhere between $300 and $500 for these current gen systems and more if some invested in extra storage, controllers and so on.  We as gamers should be concerned because if Microsoft has already thrown in the towel with the Xbox One for the Scorpio, then how does that affect the trade-in value for those of us that want to trade up?  Most of us would be lucky to get even a quarter of our system’s value to get the new consoles so no matter how you cut it, between now and the next 3 years, we will be coming out of our pockets deep for a new system.  This is in light of the idea that we thought our last system would last us just as long.

Of course there is always the caveat that no one is putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to get new systems. We are not being made to go out and buy because we have to.  In fact, many of us will probably still enjoy our current gen systems even after the new ones drop.   But, many of us cannot help but feeling like, somewhere along the line in these 3 short years, we got burned on the life expectancy  from these current gen systems. When most of us invested in our systems, none of us had the idea that something more powerful was almost literally right around the corner. We are at a point where we are getting the best of many worlds and as soon as we got settled into these digs, the bar got raised again.  Gamers, your miles many vary on how you feel about this news and many will debate the merits of possibly breaking down and being among the first to get the next system.  Rest assured that regardless of how it looks, it’s still a good time to be a gamer but it would be really nice if gaming companies give us a chance to breathe again before dangling the carrot in front of us so soon.