Quoting Moore’s law that power changes every 18 months. How will the MS Xbox compete with the rapid changes of the PC hardware acceleration? Do end users have to constantly upgrade their xbox when the initial 18 months has past and new generation graphics games have been released?
How will this effect marketing for PC developers who develop a PC game some 19 months after the Xbox has made its debut, does this mean that the xbox should be backward compatible in reference to graphic acceleration? The first set of Xbox dev kits were issued today along with Directx 8. Do you think that upgrading and providing the latest hardware acceleration is an issue or that the Xbox cant keep up with the PC.
No. I would think.
One of the point that makes consoles appealing to develope for is that its “compitable with itself”. Unlike PC’s you dont have a zillion of configuration to worry about.
Look at the playstation 1, is it possible to upgrade it?.. Not that I know of anyway. They just make a new console after 18(?) months and maybe say “…and old games from console xn will work on this console xn+1”.
I would assume Xbox will follow this pattern, unless ms think out some “new” way with upgrading a xbox. But then whats the point?. Its becoming more like a PC that way.
So either that or Xbox 1 will die after x months but by that time ms will have xbox 2 ready. Assuming xbox 1 was profitable and successfull.
Everything just go on and on…