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[Astral]

Aside from the PC Master Race vs Dirty Console Peasant debate, why hasn't anyone capitalized on the versatility of a console that can simply be upgraded piecemeal from a base model, similar to a computer, but with enough ease that if one could put together Legos they could put the parts together on it?

Part of the problem with today's consoles is that they take a few years to develop, but by the time they're released these "next generation" devices are already lagging behind the new hardware available, and can't be upgraded accordingly.

I personally fall under the PC side of things, but find this lack of modularity, and ability to upgrade as needed, is a big factor that keeps me away from consoles in general. Why buy a new $600+ box every few years, when you can buy the $200 box and apply smaller upgrades as needed?

I'm imagining a rectangular box, with each of the components as fully functioning devices, each with their own box and connectors that are equivalent to motherboard's PCIE, CPU, and other peripheral slots. For example, the CPU module would contain both the CPU and heat sink as well as any appropriate ventilation/fans/air flow requirements, and simply plug in to the appropriate slot on the console.

As another plus, depending on the system you have, you could have a good idea (based on current parts vs available parts) on what games you might be able to run, taking a lot of the guesswork out of "can my rig run X?" types of questions. Perhaps the catalog would restrict itself accordingly, for games outside of its current system specs, while allowing for advanced users to buy it anyway if they're willing to risk the frame rate drops.

This would allow for the versatility of PC gaming, with the standardization of consoles. Likely due to being too close to the idea, I'm not seeing any downsides. What is Bay12's thoughts on something like this?

[Frumple]

Why buy a new $600+ box every few years, when you can buy the $200 box and apply smaller upgrades as needed?

Why sell a $200 dollar box that can be upgraded incrementally when you can convince your market to buy a $600+ one every few years? That sounds a lot like reduced profits, to me. You'd have to convince them to buy at least $400+ worth of supplemental hardware every development cycle just to break even. Rather imagine it's significantly easier to... not do that.

PC may have lost that race before it began (though there's definitely folks trying to "correct" that, with machines that can't be opened without voiding warranty or breaking something, or can barely or not at all be upgraded), but I can't see where the benefit for the console makers is to adopt a practice that would almost certainly lose them (probably significant amounts of) money.

[IronyOwl]

Consistency. It's easy to develop for a particular console because you know that they all have the same specs. Remove this, and developers have little reason to stay. Sure, you can upgrade your console to meet a certain performance of a game you want to play, but now developers have to develop for two different components. Considering that things like OpenGL matter incredibly as to what graphics card you are using (some graphics cards do not support the latest OpenGL) this means that developers now need to add new things to their OpenGL code specifically for the higher-end graphics cards, while also maintaining backwards compatibility. With the "vertical support" of the console being maintained indefinitely, this means that so must the code (newer GPUs, etc). Release-and-forget stops being a thing, and developers no longer have a reason to bother with consoles.

Plus, being and remaining cheap and easy is a major point. You don't want to keep upgrading your console to be bigger and better, you want it to be a fully functional computer-like object that costs way less than an actual computer and which requires zero thought as to whether it can suit its intended needs.

And I mean, it's not like upgrading a PC is all that difficult to begin with; half the stuff works on slots anyway, and the other half is just bolted on with standard screws. Streamlining that to cartridge-level mix-n-matching probably wouldn't bring too many people over, and would likely make everything more expensive and bulky in the process.

[alway]

Consistency. It's easy to develop for a particular console because you know that they all have the same specs. Remove this, and developers have little reason to stay. Sure, you can upgrade your console to meet a certain performance of a game you want to play, but now developers have to develop for two different components. Considering that things like OpenGL matter incredibly as to what graphics card you are using (some graphics cards do not support the latest OpenGL) this means that developers now need to add new things to their OpenGL code specifically for the higher-end graphics cards, while also maintaining backwards compatibility. With the "vertical support" of the console being maintained indefinitely, this means that so must the code (newer GPUs, etc). Release-and-forget stops being a thing, and developers no longer have a reason to bother with consoles.

As someone who is developing with/familiar with console hardware and graphics in particular, it goes WAY beyond just this.

First and foremost: Console hardware is not general purpose PC hardware. It is custom designed, they often have hardware features which PCs or other consoles don't even have. We aren't talking just different GPU specs, we're talking 'oh hey, this device has a hardware unit built to compute this specific format of float point vectors.' For old game compatibility/emulation, some consoles have even had to physically build in redundant hardware from the previous generation because the hardware was just that unusual.

Second: these things are generally welded together, more or less. Putting together special slots so varying hardware from varying vendors works together adds physical size, expense, and usually some performance opportunity costs.

Third: Console hardware is custom built stuff. Microsoft, Sony, and so on, have their own hardware development teams that design and build these chips from the ground up. And not just build them. Because they are custom hardware, they need custom drivers. They usually have a custom OS too. Oh, and the aforementioned specialized hardware I mentioned? Yeah, you need APIs for that too. So you have special APIs akin to OpenGL which need to be written and designed from the ground up to maximize performance for applications on your platform. And usually, they have low-level graphics APIs similar to the proposed Vulkan spec.

In short, it's damn near impossible to get out a console with one set of hardware, let alone a bunch of redundant interchangeable crap to support.

Like, look at this silliness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_hardware
Not one, but 3 different pieces of hardware for processing floating point numbers; two of those being heterogeneous vector floating point units. Then a GPU on top of that. Also 2 Synergistic Processing Units, one of those from the PS1. Shit be complex.

[Bohandas]

Aside from the PC Master Race vs Dirty Console Peasant debate, why hasn't anyone capitalized on the versatility of a console that can simply be upgraded piecemeal from a base model,

That would defeat the console companies exploitative business model.

[Bauglir]

The short answer is that that's what a PC is.

The long answer is what alway posted.

There's no reason to. The market that would enjoy the feature prefers building PCs to do this exact thing. The market that consoles are aimed at, however, specifically do not want to put in the work that PC gamers must to ensure their rig can play the games they want. And make no mistake - computer specs are just about as user-friendly as it's possible to be. The things aren't confusing for the sake of fucking with you, because that doesn't sell units nearly as well as you'd think. The problem is that different games use different features of the hardware they run on to different extents, and as a result performance is not a linear function where you can say "I need a card that is at least X good to run game Y." DF has different requirements than CoD, and even just limited to the realm of AAA games there's still enough wonkiness in comparisons to ensure you still have to do exactly the multi-factor analysis you have to right now.

[itisnotlogical]

Also, if you buy an Xbox you don't have to wonder about whether or not it'll play Dark Souls or Mass Effect or whatever. You know that it'll play it consistently, because every Xbox 360 is exactly the same hardware (give or take some disk space). It makes shopping much easier.

[mainiac]

I'm imagining a rectangular box, with each of the components as fully functioning devices, each with their own box and connectors that are equivalent to motherboard's PCIE, CPU, and other peripheral slots. For example, the CPU module would contain both the CPU and heat sink as well as any appropriate ventilation/fans/air flow requirements, and simply plug in to the appropriate slot on the console.

So the CPU and RAM wouldn't be on the motherboard?  I'm no hardware expect but that sounds inefficient.  The CPU also needs a fan and heatsink so those would need to be in that "module" which would dictate a pretty clunky design for the module.  And really, what is there to modularize besides the cpu?  The tiny hard drive?  The blue-ray drive?

As long as the CPU, GPU and RAM are staying on the motherboard where they belong there's no need to have upgrade capability for the blue ray drive because it wont go obsolete until after the cpu, gpu and motherboard are obsolete. Keep those on the motherboard and all that's left is a console with memory you can swap out.  Swapable memory for consoles has been around for like 20 years.  Maybe an external wifi attachment, which is also something we've seen and frankly are kinda annoying.

[Culise]

Indeed.  Memory cards gave way to swappable hard drives, certain optional modular components that games couldn't rely on existing used to be more common, and you can also already swap out peripherals such as controllers to upgrade or replace as necessary (f'rex, the transition of the PS1 from the original model controller to the Dual Analog to the Dual Shock).  It's only the core nitty-gritty that isn't swappable in this manner, and that's because designing it around such would cause issues as outlined earlier. 

[Reelya]

From the consumer's point of view, modular consoles would break the core advantage of a single unit that does a single purpose. Would the consumer want a "modular VCR" or a "modular microwave" with upgradable parts? No... the consumers actually like the fact that they can buy an off-the-shelf machine, and be 100% sure it will run this selection of games at a consistent framerate and you never have to get in and adjust "settings". And since all those upgrade slots and systems cost money to research and manufacture, the total cost of ownership will definitely increase, even if you never upgrade your machines and always wait for the next big revision, you're paying extra because the machine needed to be designed to be upgradable.

From the developer's point of view, modular consoles breaks the core advantage of consoles: one game fits all machines. This massively reduces the cost of producing games for the devices, and is a core reason why AAA developers jumped ship from PCs to console in the first place. Removing that unique selling point would defeat the purpose of having game consoles ... Do you support the base unit only, or the upgraded version? And which build? And then you have to test the game on all possible configurations, just to be sure it will run properly. And then you'd still probably target it at the base machine so that the most possible people can buy your game. Or you waste time adding in adjustable settings... then the player needs to go into the console settings whenever they get a new game and tweak setting before they can play the game.

Even with the extra "peak" power of a PC, you actually need to target games a generation behind if you want to sell them to more than a handful of people (well you target a current top of the line machine when you start making the game, and ship it three years later). And a game that scales with processing power and graphics will definitely cost more to produce than a game targeting one reference machine only. And you know a PS3 game will run exactly the same today as it will in three years time, so there are many less surprises and performance issues later on. Those saved resources can be spent elsewhere, meaning console games can be more polished than an equivalent PC game.

Additional memory is just about the only thing you want to be moddable on a console.

[Starver]

The stated problems with modularised consoles is exactly why I think the concept of modularised mobile phones (e.g., which looks well-thought out, but I'm not holding my breath) is doomed to not be what it is actually supposed to be.

Extra (storage) memory in for the form of a removable/semi-hot-swappable memory card and extra battery power by either a cable-linked booster (technically a peripheral) or a 'battery shoe' design (effectively a docking-station) are probably the two things that would work.  Everything else would probably work better as a generic peripheral needing some sort of common interface (mini/micro USB, or NFC/bluetooth/wifi wireless connection) that could work with any platform for which the hardware designer can get its respective drivers to work with.  Anything else just causes more headaches for the OEM than necessary, at least where they don't pass on those headaches to any independent developers who need to handle such a varying hardware configuration without a firmware 'buffering'.


This is why, traditionally, Macs were pretty much static in performance, but stable for all that.  Meanwhile, the "IBM 100% Compatible" crowd were worrying about such things as EMM386 settings and later on trying to find the right Soundblaster16-compatible settings to manually put into the right .INI (or equivalent) file for each game...  By the time of Windows '9x we started to get this process fully OS-mediated (so that as long as a new piece of hardware worked at all, it ought to work with everything else with no fuss... but YMMV), and meanwhile Apple started tentatively letting their users back into their cases to change things like RAM without ideally (like in the days of the SE) going back to the Authorised Dealer to get access to the limited expansion opportunities.

Spoiler: But my mindset is such that... (click to show/hide)

...consoles (which I'm not a fan of, perhaps because I'm too much of a control-freak myself and they don't even offer the kinds of things that I look for in a computing device) should be of a standard, at least for a single hardware generation, while I should be capable of using as low-powered or as high-powered a set of components as I wish in a computer.  Macs still confuse me (not sure if they're best-of-both-worlds or worse-of-both-worlds, but I'm a fish out of water when I don't have the same potential of delving under the hood, even though I know that it's better these days) and for some reason I'm happy enough with my Android device (not being an iPad person, perhaps due to my general Mac-reluctance) only being 'upgraded' to the level of the storage the memory card provides, and assuming that apps are then going to be faultless (working with the hardware, as they do, through the respective Android virtual machine, smoothing out the differences between Android devices) except where the developer has boobed, perhaps by making a wrong assumption...  Even though the AndroidOS is probably as much at fault, for letting me try to do something silly.

As such, I'm probably going to be wrong about the potential for modularity.  Except that I think that (in those cases in which I'm willing to dismiss it as a 'fad' idea) it's trying to answer questions that generally aren't even being asked.  People want to replace their iPhones/XBoxes/whatever with the next version (perhaps in part because that's what Apple/Microsoft/etc wants them to do), and apart from the occasionally very public 'global failure' of new hardware (e.g. "Red Ring Of Death") it's just more convenient to do this for such consumer items.

Meanwhile, the most advanced console I have in this house has (hardwired into it) the ability to play Pong, whilst my mobile phone doesn't have any use for a 'data' connection, beyond the ability to send and receive texts.  The upgradable PCs (and less-upgradable servers, if only because of the physical confines of the rack-mounting cases) around the house help me with some things, my tablet gives me something else, and beyond that I'm happiest experimenting with both Raspberry Pi and Arduino-powered devices, with the same attitude of build-and-rebuild as I have long used with Lego sets...

So, is there an explanation in there why I wouldn't consider upgrading a modular console?  Or phone?  Not sure.

[miauw62]

-snip-

and current-gen consoles still can't run games at the same rate as current good gaming computers :v

[Neonivek]

by the way...

They have modularized consoles before... Sega did it extensively... and the Playstation was originally going to be an addon for the Super Nintendo.

[Sergarr]

They did. It's called PC.

[Graknorke]

relevant?

But as for why, besides the obvious money-grubbing reasons, chances are that if devs not only had to program for an underpowered machine but and underpowered machine with multiple hardware configurations, they just wouldn't bother.