The coming of the 9th generation of consoles

I eagerly await publishers’ explanations for why rural customers and other people who can’t have good Internet for one reason or another can’t play video games anymore.

Over the next couple of years, people without decent internet connections won’t have the money to pay for videogames. We aren’t quite there yet, but soon.

Considering we’re at least 2-3 years away from the 9th gen, and that the 9th gen will then last at least 5-7 years, we’re looking at a decade from now.

Think about tech in 2008.

I doubt this very much, I mean there is almost a bundle a day of games being released for <$5.

Day 1 new releases sure they may cost a fortune, but a year after release games near 75% off.

In 2008, my family was paying $90 a month for satellite Internet. 2Mb/s down and a 425MB daily download cap. We were still stuck on that for almost four years after that, at which point a local ISP started offering a terrestrial wireless service with no cap and…6Mb/s down.

These days, my parents have fiber, but only after an ISP from downstate bought out the local ISP and started installing fiber everywhere. They had no service improvements whatsoever between when they started on that terrestrial wireless service and when they switched to fiber last fall.

Yes, but you need a $200+ console or $400 computer and electricity to power those things. If you don’t have internet access in 2025, you’re likely sitting on the floor in a mud hut.

If the upcoming LEO satellite internet options live up to their promise, lack of affordable access to decent internet shouldn’t really be a thing anymore(assuming you have enough money to spend on a console).

As long as you don’t try playing games that require a low “ping”, since the lag in satellite internet is at least 500ms.

LEO satellites solve that problem as they are physically much closer to the ground.

My feeling is satellite internet, even LEO satellite, is not the answer for one very simple reason-- it’s incredibly expensive to accelerate payloads to escape velocity. That’s where things like Project Loon come in, using high-altitude balloons. They make a lot more sense.

Hmmm. Just checked and well, if they manage to reach the promised 25 to 35 ms roundabout time, yes, it does look viable. I think it’s more realistic to think in the 50 ms range, but it does sound good enough for most things.

You doubted me? You offend me, sirrah.

This is true, but the SpaceX plan is still pretty viable:

The Internet communication satellites are expected to be in the smallsat-class of 100-to-500 kg (220-to-1,100 lb)-mass, which are intended to be in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at an altitude of approximately 1,100 kilometers (680 mi)

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy :

PAYLOAD TO LEO
63,800kg (140,660 lb)

So even at 500 kg per satellite, they’ll be able to launch 127 per load.

Initial plans as of January 2015 were for the constellation to be made up of approximately 4000 cross-linked[30] satellites, more than twice as many operational satellites as were in orbit in January 2015.[5]

So that’s 32 full loads of satellites. Or many fewer loads if they can make the sats a lot smaller, which I think is their plan. SpaceX in 2017 launched 18 rockets, and they’ve already done 11 this year, so they’re on target for increasing total launches.

SpaceX said it plans to significantly increase the number of launches in 2018. “We will increase our cadence next year about 50 percent,” Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and COO, told SpaceNews in November. “We’ll fly more next year than this year, knock on wood, and I think we will probably level out at about that rate, 30 to 40 per year.”

So a couple years of launches of just these satellites to take care of it, so that SpaceX/Musk can offer internet to practically anyone in the US (and later the world) at competitive speeds and prices. I think they’ll do it. That’s a lot of money. Probably not by 2020 though, which was their goal. They launched the first two test satellites in Feb. 2018 which was 2 years later than they were planning already.

Not exactly. There is a stretch of the freeway over here… everyone on one side does not have access to cable or internet, not even DSL. Charter and I forget who it is now, Embarq maybe, won’t pay to go over that part of the road.

They will in a couple years, though. I didn’t say we were there yet.

@arrendek: The other problem with LEO is that they require a lot of altitude corrections to stay in orbit, in other words fuel. Can’t use solar power for that, you need reaction mass. It is of course possible to do, but I don’t see it being remotely near as cost-effective as weather balloons.

Also, they can be used to microwave your brain, so take an umbrella with you everywhere.

I think the idea is that they’ll just keep replacing these satellites. Like I said when bringing it up, they have to actually achieve the promise. That requires cheap and small satellites to work with the types of launch prices SpaceX is working towards.

Well yes, but each has to be boosted out of the Earth’s gravity, which is very expensive compared to weather balloons.

My own wishlist for the next generation:

  1. Bring back Snap mode. I miss being able to watch TV while playing games like Destiny. I would have never spent so many hours playing that game if I hadn’t been catching up on TV shows at the same time. The game had no story to keep track of, and therefore was perfect as a game to play while watching (though, mostly listening) to TV shows.

  2. OTA DVR please. This was an announced feature for Xbox that got canceled. Plex allows it, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, and nowhere near as smooth as what you get on Xbox when you pause Live TV. But that only allows you up to 30 minutes of commercial forwarding.

  3. Backwards compatibility and full access to previous digital library and ability to play disc-games from previous generation.

  4. Possibly VR support. I’ve never tried VR, but when I do talk to people who have tried it, I get jealous. It would be interesting to have that as an option in the next generation of consoles.

Sadly, given the trajectory of updates on Xbox 1, I’m probably not going to get wish number 1 or wish number 2. It’s a damn shame. I wish I could factory reset the Xbox 1 somehow and get snap mode back.

I always feel like I’d watch more things in general if I could snap them to the side of my screen while I play games, but then I think “hmm, this doesn’t work well with foreign stuff with subtitles or with games where I want the audio,” and that’s a lot of what I want to watch and a lot of what I want to play respectively. I don’t end up listening to podcasts while gaming for the same reason.

Yeah, it’s a mix. There were a lot of games where snapping TV wasn’t appropriate, and there were a lot of TV shows where snapping TV wasn’t appropriate. But the ones that were ideal for it were things like Destiny, Forza games, The Daily Show, sports events on TV, Witcher 3’s Gwent. I definitely would never have played Gwent if it weren’t for snap mode.