Sony Won't Invest As Heavily In PlayStation 4 353
donniebaseball23 writes "Sony CFO Masaru Kato told investors this week that the company won't be looking to put the same kind of massive R&D into PS4 as they did with PS3. PS3's costs were astronomical because of Blu-ray and the Cell chip, but Sony's bottom line can't take another similar hit. Analysts are speculating that this will leave the door open for competitors like Microsoft. 'PS4's hardware could be less impressive than the PS3 at its launch. I think Microsoft will really be able to put the screws to Sony in the next console war,' Panoptic analyst Asif Khan commented to IndustryGamers."
Re:Pro move actually (Score:4, Informative)
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
Unsurprising (Score:5, Informative)
Sony of all companies should have known that the most technically advanced console doesn't generally perform the best in the market. Sega's Saturn had a multiprocessor architecture before most game programmers knew how to program for one and the PlayStation destroyed it in the marketplace. Similarly, the PS2 fared better in the marketplace than the technically superior Xbox and GameCube (which was primarily hampered by storage space issues like the N64 before it).
What is important is third-party support. That's what made the NES, the PlayStation, the PlayStation 2 and other successful consoles. If you have a system developers want to develop for, then you'll get the good quality titles that have people flocking to buy your system.
Re:Bad for GL development? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bad for GL development? (Score:4, Informative)
All consoles makers use OpenGL
While they may come with OpenGL-like APIs no actual developers use them.
Re:Pro move actually (Score:4, Informative)
The Cell SPE went on to also become the 360's CPU, but there are no Cell PPEs (the thing that actually makes them Cell processors) in the 360.
Re:I don't see why they should... (Score:2, Informative)
The PS3 has 9 processors using three instruction sets/performance profiles available to developers: one central PPC processor, 7 limited vector processors, and a GPU.The vector processors are capable of executing 2 (or maybe 3? I forget) instructions at once, given proper instruction ordering (none of the processors support OOE).
The XBox360 has 4 processors using 2 instruction sets/performance profiles available to developers: 3 PPC cores and one GPU. The PPC cores support SMT, allowing them to execute two threads at once (these are symmetric). None of the processors are OOE.
The 360's architecture is simpler than the PS3's -- but it's not THAT much simpler.
Re:Consoles Done For? (Score:4, Informative)
The current console model used by sony and microsoft is broken. They lose money on everything. They lose money on everything. Microsoft has yet to make a dime on xbox 1 and xbox 360. The lose the money to get marketshare.
Xbox is in the red if you account the entire development and marketing history - which was very expensive because of a "let's throw however much money it takes to force ourselves into the market" attitude. But year-to-year business has been profitable since 2008, with revenue ($$$ for licenses, games and peripherals) ahead of expenses (cost of making the console units themselves) - so it would seem to me that the model itself works just fine.