Though Microsoft didn’t even wait five years to jump from Xbox 1 to 360, the company plans to sit on its current breadwinner for the foreseeable future.
Instead of making the leap to another piece of hardware, Microsoft plans to focus on improving the 360’s games and features, specifically Xbox Live, President Robbie Bach said in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News.
Having witnessed the monumental success of the technologically inferior Wii, Bach seems to believe that the pursuit of more technologically advanced hardware has ended and the next generation of consoles will have to do more than simply push pixels. “Just coming up with something that’s faster and prettier isn’t going to be sufficient,” Bach said. “The life cycle for this generation – and I’m not just talking about Xbox, I’d include Wii and PS3 as well – is probably going to be a little longer than previous generations.”
Building a product that has value beyond its technological power is especially important in the light of the world’s current economic woes. Since money’s tight for everyone these days, selling a new console to consumers right now would be difficult, Bach believes. “When you look at consumers, they are going to be more value-conscious,” Bach said. In the end, putting out a new console might be mostly a matter of waiting for the right time. “We want to make sure that as the economy does start to recover, that we’re positioned as well.” So if Microsoft’s got anything in the works (and they probably do), they’ll be sitting on it until this whole recession thing starts to right itself. Hope that it does, because it might mean the difference between this generation of games and the next.
