Sony Won't Invest As Heavily In PlayStation 4

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."

Comments

Unsurprising

[lyinhart]

If this is true, then it is not a surprise. Sony released the PS3, the most technically advanced of all the current generation consoles, only to be outsold by the comparatively weak Wii. And in addition, games released on both PS3 and Xbox 360 generally looked better on the 360 (e.g. Bayonetta).

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.