FEBRUARY 2019 PCWorld 97headset is cheap, the PS4 to run it is cheap,
and it’s put VR into a lot of living rooms even if
the experience isn’t on a par with the Oculus
Rift and HTC Vive.
Does Sony pursue it though? Who knows.
People are buying it, but perhaps not enough
people to justify building an entire platform
around it. Microsoft meanwhile has showed
little interest in VR ever since it released its
Windows MR headsets to a collective shrug.
It’s hard to believe the next Xbox has anything
to do with VR.
It’s hard to know what Microsoft has
planned at all, really. That’s the kicker, I think.
Sony, I’m anticipating a pretty standard PlaySta-
tion 5 roll-out, precisely the competitor that
Slightly Mad thinks it’s sending the Mad Box
up against in “three years” or whatever: 4K and
60 frames per second, an RTX 2060-level APU,
16GB of RAM, an SSD, et cetera.
Microsoft’s been looking wily, though. It’s
been hinting that the future is subscriptions
and streaming and, well, not traditional con-
soles. Every time a new hardware generation’s
coming around we spend years talking about
“The Death of Consoles,” and it never seems
to happen—but maybe this time it does, right?
And if that’s the case, and Microsoft can
get the latency down enough, put enough
servers in enough places, then the Mad Box
suddenly feels very old. It’s a big box with a
bunch of hardware inside when maybe all
Microsoft thinks you need is a Steam Link–
style device that hooks up to your internet.
Wouldn’t that be wild?BOTTOM LINE
In any case, you’ve got to wonder what
Slightly Mad knows. After all, they’re a
developer. It’s not outlandish to think
Slightly Mad has received dev kits for the
upcoming Xbox and PlayStation, knows
what specs Microsoft and Sony are target-
ing, and has planned out its Mad Box
around those numbers.
That’s not to say the Mad Box ever
releases. Again, and I can’t stress this
enough, I don’t think the Mad Box ever
releases. If it does, I still don’t think it takes
off. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested,
as Slightly Mad jockeys for position. At the
very least, maybe it gets Microsoft and Sony
to push their next-gen hardware a bit further
than they did at the outset of this current
generation, and we all benefit from that—
even PC gamers.MICROSOFT’S BEEN LOOKING WILY, THOUGH. IT’S BEEN
HINTING THAT THE FUTURE IS SUBSCRIPTIONS AND
STREAMING AND, WELL, NOT TRADITIONAL CONSOLES.