When is the best time to release a new console?

If I asked Joe (co creator of this site and all round hater of life) he would tell me, not now, but we don’t need to worry about what he says, he hates kittens and happiness.

However there’s been a lot of discussion around the Xbox one X and why its a bad time to release it now, in fact, before we get to it can we just acknowledge that this is a fucking awful name, truly awful its lacking imagination and creativity on all levels. I miss when we had awesome names for consoles like Jaguar or Dreamcast those names sound so cool! Why didn’t they call it Scorpio, that sounds cool and dangerous, not a one X, what does that even mean? It sounds like a answer to a science exam.

Now we’ve taken apart the name lets get to it, the one X is great value, in fact its incredible value, currently its retail price is £449.99 in the UK for that you get:

An 8 core 2.3GHz CPU
A 1.172 GHz GPU that’s capable of 6.0 Teraflop
12GB GDDR5 @ 326 GB/s
8GB of flash and a 1tb HDD with true 4k UHD

For those that don’t know, a teraflop is a measure of a computer’s speed and can be expressed as: A trillion floating point operations per second. 10 to the 12th power floating-point operations per second. 2 to the 40th power flops. Confused? So am I, they seem to be the big buzz word a few years ago, no one had heard of a Teraflop. I’m convinced Microsoft invented them in a marketing ploy for the one X. Put it this way, this is a very powerful console, the most powerful in fact and you would struggle getting this performance from a gaming pc with the same budget, its almost impossible actually I’ve looked into it.

So why is this a bad time to release a console? Most of what I’ve heard is the lack of games and exclusives to go alongside this console are what’s going against it.

Rubbish!

Did the switch struggle to shift units with only one game worth owning? (Zelda BOTW). The answer, esteemed reader, is no, it didn’t, it bloody sold millions of units in fact. It was Nintendo’s fastest selling console, ever.

Look the point I’m trying to make is there is a market for this, there will be people with lovely 4k HDR TV’s that want to game in native 4K, or maybe someone who hasn’t got a current gen console yet and wants to look at the best console for them (why wouldn’t you pick the most powerful system?) or someone who wants to jump on board and get a xbox as well to play some of their games and doesn’t have room for a PC. Games are coming for the Xbox one X, this is a whole new level of power for home consoles, but people will always moan, the internet is that way, there’s always something to run down.

No one is forcing you to go and buy a One X but if you do want to buy one, know this, you are getting value for money and most of the bigger games will be cross platform. There are some really cool looking Xbox games to play on the one X such as Sea of thieves or State of decay 2. Sure people will start saying these aren’t “exclusive” as they can be played on PC but does any of that matter?

I personally respect the specs, the price point and effort Microsoft have put into making this beautiful machine, and we will start seeing more and more games to play on it as we get further into 2017, so no Joe you’re wrong mate and now I’ve got it published so my point is more legitimate than yours.