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:but do people buy consoles for the HW? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then, once you have the game developers, you get the games that sell the console to the players.
I bet on Sony last time (Score:2, Insightful)
I own a PS3. I bet on the PS3 with real money. I'm no fan of microsoft (ask anyone, anyone at all, ask everyone), and I won't buy microsoft consoles (go ahead, put screws to my fingernails, is that all ya got?), but I am not cheerful with Sony either. Rootkits, removing otheros, lawsuits against people who try to restore what they bought and paid for (when I buy an NVIDIA video card, NVIDIA does NOT get anal over what I do with the video card, when I buy an ASUS motherboard, ASUS does *NOT* get anal over what I do with the motherboard; its *NONE* of Sonys business what I do with the PS3 that *I* paid for and *I* own (and they stopped owning all of it the second *I* paid for it)! I might not be able to stop their lawyers, but I can never buy any of their products again, and I can strongly discourage anyone and everyone that I know from ever buying any of their products again. They don't have to be reasonable, and I don't have to support them.
Re:Pro move actually (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow what a clueless moron
Not "less powerful", but "less investment" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony didn't say that they are going to produce a less powerful design, but a design which costs less, in terms of investment.
Although the outcome may be a not-so-powerful console, the other possibility is something with less "custom" solutions.
Such as:
- Off-the-shelf CPUs/GPUs, or custom ASICs using 3rd-party licensed CPU/GPU designs (instead of designing one from scratch)
- Off-the-shelf DDR(1/2/3/4/5/whatever) SDRAM (instead of using something from Rambus)
- Blu-ray, instead of a new kind of optical disk design (or, even eliminate the physical medium altogether in favor of online purchases)
I don't see why they should... (Score:5, Insightful)
The PS3 had a lot of power when new. But since it was such a far-out architecture, developers had to work to get to it. And developers generally aren't interested in doing so. They'd rather just port their C code over and type make.
A system that is a little less powerful but much more conventional (like Xbox 360) could easily cost less and produce better games overall, even if the absolute top levels of capability are reduced.
Re:Pro move actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it is. And the OP exactly right.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html [wsj.com]
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Repeat after me: Don't feed the trolls.
Re:Why would they invest heavily now? (Score:2, Insightful)
and they reduce the progress of video games
No, they don't. Maybe they reduce the progress of techno-wank, but some of the best and most innovative games of this generation have been on the Wii, DS and PSP.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's assuming that mobile phones don't become more powerful than consoles.
Not likely. Even assuming that is a possibility the only machines that would be under threat would be the handhelds and even this can be debated. The main problems with any portable device are it's screen size and it's controls, so when comparing a handheld against a console or PC with much, much larger screen size and extensive control's then there is no contest.
Compare say a mobile smartphone against handhelds such as the Nintendo and Sony offerings, again there is not that much of a contest since the handhelds have dedicated buttons (soft or hard) that are not on the screen which in itself is IMHO a pain since the screen eventually gets marked. This is not to say mobiles cannot be a gaming platform, they can, but their games are no way as sophisticated as those on a handheld or even a console or PC. Of course if you like games such as "Angry Birds" then a mobile smart phone is fine. I know you can get adventure games for the mobile smart phone but IMHO the controls sux. I have a HTC Desire HD and my wife has an iPhone 4 and I have yet to see a game for those machines that can compete with console, handheld.or even PC games.
But I hear people say, it may possibly plug your smartphone into a HD TV via (wired or wireless) and possibly add peripheral devices such as keyboard and mouse. Great, assuming this is done your mobile smartphone is now a console but you still won't be able the play more sophisticated games when the phone is disconnected from it's peripherals or HD screen unless the laws of physics suddenly allow you to put a 40" or bigger HDTV in your pocket. So in summing up, mobile smartphones, handhelds, consoles and PC's all offer different levels of gaming sophistication and to compare mobile games against console or PC games is just pointless.
That makes 2 of us (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So that was the end of that chapter (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the thing. I used to LOVE Nintendo games. That's why the past few years have been so disappointing with even N themselves phoning it in and publicly discarding the old faithful for the shovelware crap-devouring "casual" market.
Mario Galaxy wasn't great (it was no Mario 64 like it was trying to be), but it was fun. The sequel (which I played to the end) was simply not as much fun and brought nothing new to the table. It seemed like more of an expansion pack.
SSBB is horrible compared to SSBM. The raw fighting mode is prettier, but not really different, and the story mode is far less fun than the one in Melee.
The infinite suckage of Metroid:Other M actually has nothing to do with the voice acting and only partly to do with the craptastic characterization, but with the abandoning of the entire exploration concept (The same way Castlevania did with the God of War wannabe reboot, thus killing both sides of the beloved "Metroidvania" evolutionary line). They tried that once before the last time the guy in charge got his hands on the series and he "blessed" us with the peice of crap that was Metroid: Fusion.
DKC admittedly never did much for me, so it's no surprise that more of the same didn't impress me.
Mario Kart Wii is just unplayable because, with the DS version, it stopped being a "racing" game with the whole "I win button" items that changed the idea from "Race around the track fast" to "hug second place until Computer-Peach gets the blue shell/Bullet Bill"
Zelda slipped a little in the WW days (not just because of the graphics that I didn't care for, but the whole "spend 60% of your time sailing across empty water" aspect) but Twilight Princess was almost flawless, except for the stupid controls (I made the mistake of buying the Wii version) and the damn bug-collecting. Nonetheless, considering all that's been showing up, I find it hard to be excited about Skyward Sword.
The Wii had some really good games, early on. Zak and Wiki was a nice nod to the old adventure/puzzlers of yore, Trauma Center was innovative if a bit "Nintendo-Hard" towards the end (I know it was originally a DS title). Super Paper Mario was boatloads of fun (except for that stupid hamster wheel bit).
See, the problem isn't that I have nothing nice to say about Nintendo games. It's that after a certain point, the releases that weren't casual-fodder trash just got very "samey" and, like the DS, the novelty of the control scheme just stopped being enough to differentiate it or make up for its shortcomings.
Re:Pro move actually (Score:1, Insightful)
I should really quit replying to this article, my karma is going to hell. People are misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about if they're all just PPC ripoffs, or if Microsoft "stole" their design (clearly they did not). My point in my original post was simply that Microsoft benefited by waiting to see what Sony did by using a chip provided by IBM that was largely funded by Sony, and that going second is a lot cheaper to 1up when it comes to hardware wars.
"The Xenon processor was not a ripoff of the Cell, IBM just used some of the technology that they developed with the other processor."
That's exactly the point, the technology was developed by IBM at the behest of Sony for the PS3. It was a joint effort but largely funded by Sony, which is why they're so leery on doing so again, exactly for the reasons you made.
"The article says that all the companies involved had the right to use the technology developed for the Cell for other projects and other customers. This is standard practice."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_Xbox_360 [wikipedia.org]
No matter if it was malicious - Microsoft benefited in their consoles from technology funded by Sony. Sony has realized their mistake.
A little frustrating that I got marked as a troll, and I appreciate your response. This is all to do with business, little to do with the actual technology.
Re:I bet on Sony last time (Score:4, Insightful)
I let the root kit thing go, I let the killing of Lik-Sang go, but there is no way in hell Im going to allow outright theft from me (OtherOS, bought and paid for feature) and a direct assault on the First go. Fuck that and fuck your 'whiner' rhetoric.
Well it was also a pretty big boondoggle (Score:4, Insightful)
So when you look back, you discover the Cell was actually intended to be the GPU for the PS3. They thought it would be so good at stream processing that it would do the graphics. I don't know if that was wishful thinking or willful blindness but either way, we all know it didn't work out. Ended up causing a lot of trouble.
It was really a bad idea for Sony to go and design a new, experimental architecture for use in a consumer system. That is the kind of thing to try in research and maybe high end systems first, and then once it gets refined move towards mainstream.