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

Re:but do people buy consoles for the HW?

[gman003]

HW is a good way to sell the console to game developers, though. A lot of big 3rd-parties jumped ship with the Wii, simply because it couldn't keep up. Similarly, you can get developers to make good exclusives if you have a uniquely powerful console.

And then, once you have the game developers, you get the games that sell the console to the players.

Not "less powerful", but "less investment"

[ihavnoid]

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...

[YesIAmAScript]

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

[Galactic Dominator]

Except it is. And the OP exactly right.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html

That makes 2 of us

[Huntr]

Sony has really pissed me off with all their bullshit. So much that, *I* won't be investing heavily in the PS4, either. Like not at all.