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With all the recent discussions of future consoles from Sony and Microsoft, we've decided to tackle one of the most significant questions - should future consoles be upgradeable?
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The Hackmaster -
I really don't see it happening. Console manufacturers might evaluate the possibilities, and determine that they'd fare better in a perfect world by frankensteining their current generation machine, but I don't think they could market it successfully. If makers sell an add-on card as a peripheral, most people will reckon it's an unnecessary expense like a Kinect or a Power Glove or an Eye Toy. They'll ignore it, and the only games that will come out for it will be niche. So the manufacturers would have to force developers to treat it as a new console release, following the usual life-cycle plans. Then the developers would probably take a bath on games that use the add-on for a while, because consumers are oblivious to the planned shift, and don't see a reason to upgrade. If the makers package it as a group of add-ons and simply market that as the next console (old console required), they'd probably enjoy some consumer ire for deceptive practices.
We have to assume that "next generation" could be well served by the core of the current generation systems, and I don't know if that's true. Certainly, they'd benefit from a RAM upgrade at a minimum. I doubt there's a consumer-friendly way that extra banks could be added to any of these consoles. Certainly the PS3 would be resistant. Assuming the X-Box 360 is still a purpose-built PC at heart, you might be able to crack that open and swap out some sticks, I guess.
It'd be interesting to see Sony or MS try it, though. I'd almost advise Sony to do it, just because their development support for the PS3 was so slow in coming that I hate to see them start from scratch. The PS3 seemed to be striving for Saturn levels of novelty at times, so I shudder to think what sort of devilry they're thinking up for the PS4.
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