Most of you may know Michael Pachter from his show “Pach Attack” on Gametrailers, where he usually answers questions about the gaming industry. But few of you may also know that Michael Pachter is a Game Business Analyst.

What does Michael Pachter Do ?
He provides forecasts , analysis and long term solutions for the gaming industry. Recently Pachter showed an estimate of whats going to happen with consoles by 2016. Pachter made a conclusion based on several assumptions and put forward the future of how consoles would be doing by the year 2016 in a simple email.
The Future of Next Gen Consoles
This is how it goes:
- We expect Sonys and Microsofts new consoles to thrive over the next three years, with cumulative worldwide sales of 37.7 million PS4 and 29 million Xbox One consoles by year-end 2016. We do not expect Nintendos Wii U to fare as well, with cumulative sales of under 20 million by 2016.
- Our overall forecast is based upon several assumptions: first, we expect console prices to decline only modestly over the next three years, with PS4 pricing in the U.S. dropping from $399.99 at launch to $299.99 by 2016 and with Xbox One pricing in the U.S. dropping from $499.99 at launch to $349.99 by 2016; second, we expect new release software pricing to remain at $59.99 in the U.S. for the next three years; finally, we expect Nintendo to continue producing the Wii U. Should any of these assumptions prove to be incorrect, hardware and software sales will be affected, and it is highly likely that the ultimate results will differ significantly from our forecast.
Console Prices Will Drop
The price dropping for next generation consoles is something we already knew would happen sometime in the future, but when exactly no-one knows. But according to Pachtes conclusion, Sonys Playstation 4 seems to be the clear winner of the console wars, hitting an estimated 37.7 million units sold by 2016.
Microsofts Xbox One will trail behind with only 29 million units estimated to be sold by 2016. A little bit of the blame could be its pricing, when someone can buy a console with similar specs thats 100 cheaper why shouldnt they ? If youre interested in resolutions, some Xbox One games are capped at 720p, while the PS4 is offering a full 1080p native resolution.
Another console Pachter mentioned was Nintendos Wii U, which seems will be continued. Still all these calculations are just a theory based on assumptions, and the extreme results would differ. But the results seem promising as Sony is already in very good shape compared to other consoles.
Though its been a little over a month since the Xbox One and PS4 released, there are still doubts whether memory will be sufficient to last an entire generation. Xbox One allocates 5GB of RAM for games and were still a little unclear on how much the PS4 allocates. There have been rumors of 5.5 GB earlier but nothing is concrete at the moment. Regardless of how much RAM these systems have, Havoks Head of Product Management Andrew Bowell believes that it will take no time developers to use all of the memory quickly.
“Developers have long dreamt about more RAM. RAM has been so scarce over the last 20 years in console hardware that I feel many prayers have been answered this time around However it will take absolutely no time for artists to use all available RAM, even 8 GB, you can be sure of that,” he said to GamingBolt.
He also explained how Havok makes sure that they fulfill that all of a sudden and not in the box type of requirement from developers due to increase in RAM.
“In terms of Havok technology, it has always been our goal to enable developers to do more with less. Even with the large amounts of RAM available, the developers will still find ways to use even last byte. To that end, it is always a requirement for middleware to have the smallest possible memory footprint. This is also becoming even more of a requirement as console developers look at ways to bring their title to mobile platforms.”
Its already been obvious, especially with concerns to hurdles such as the Xbox Ones eSRAM. However, for developers to be able to utilize, say, all the available game memory of the PS4? It will be a while before something like this is possible, but take that as an assurance that the next generation of consoles isnt going anywhere any time soon.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have plenty of memory space available on paper but it doesnt mean they can use all of them for actual games. Both next generation consoles allocate a lot of the memory space for their operating systems, which can result in the reduction of the available memory for games. Industry Insider Ahsan Rasheed, also known by his nickname Thuway, drops another tweet that suggests the same.
According to Ahsan Rasheed, he has talked with one of the developer regarding any potential bottleneck for both systems.
So talking to a developer, I asked: “What is the biggest bottleneck for PS4/Xbox One?”
His response: “Memory.” Not CUs, ALUs, ROPs, TF counts, CPU cores – nope none of that. Memory. M-E-M-O-R-Y.
The PlayStation 3 also allocated a lot of its available memory space to its operating system, but with time, it managed to free up more space in memory for games, reducing the one required for its operation system through optimizations.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are expected to go through similar phases. While initially, they might seem to be allocating a lot of space in memory for their OS, they will gradually reduce this overhead with optimization done over the next couple of years. The extra allocation for OS is necessary to introduce new features.
Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have 8 GB of memory, which is a huge step up from the previous generations 512 MB. As games are getting progressively more complicated, they require far more resource and as per Ahsan Rasheed, there are games already in development for PlayStation 4 that utilize as much as 6 GB of RAM.
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