Speaking to The Guardian recently, Twitch TV CEO and Founder Emmett Shear said that the lengthy life cycle of consoles goes against the norm in the industry:
The problem is, the seven-year upgrade life cycle doesn’t work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform. 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.
According to him, Sony and Microsoft will have to “change form” with their consoles, and it could come through making gaming hardware more like set-top boxes:
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.
His thoughts on consoles doesn’t mean Twitch is doing poorly on them though, with the PS4 and Xbox One being “huge” for them, especially when it comes to titles like FIFA and Call of Duty. However, he does add that “the top end of broadcasting still tends to come from PC.”
For the future of Twitch on consoles, Shear says they’re working on a way to allow users to take part in on-screen chat sessions without a keyboard, while also doing a better job on discovery. He adds, “The flipside of being OS integrated is, you can’t iterate every two to three weeks, but we’re happy with how its going.”
Do you think we’ll see another console generation?
[Source: The Guardian]
