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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."
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.
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
Why not reuse the cell design: use the exact same chip, but manufacture it with current lithography technology, smaller structures, higher clockrate, more SPUs. It may do the trcik, and there is no new learning curve for devs. I have programmed SPUs, and they can do wonders if used correctly.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
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)
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.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The typical API's on Wii and PS3 are not OpenGL. IIRC the PS3 offers an OpenGL API, but it is almost never used.
Except it is. And the OP exactly right.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html
brandelf -t FreeBSD
All consoles makers use OpenGL
While they may come with OpenGL-like APIs no actual developers use them.
Repeat after me: Don't feed the trolls.
define successful? Sure the Wii has moved a lot of units. But in terms of games sold, hours played, or in terms of money made for developers (not necessarily manufacturers) they are way behind. Good for nintendo does not necessarily equate to success as platform.
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.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
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.
The consoles make it more like gaming was in the early days. Tweak the shit out of what you have, because you can't just make them buy a new machine to play your "super game". Consider the C-64... its lifespan showed that developers could make some seriously awesome game if they got to know the architecture.
What PC gaming did is make it easy for companies to write something that took more horsepower, and because of the architecture of PCs, developers could just require more this or more that. (believe me, it wasn't a conscious decision to make the architecture open... IBM was just in a rush.)
I like the idea that game companies work on an architecture and squeeze it dry. Why should we go back to the model that allow developers to be lazy and code for the "latest and greatest" because they can't be bothered to get into the architecture. One of the primary reasons I don't game on the PC anymore is the upgrade loop I can't get out of. Now that my computers are not for gaming, I get MANY more years of life out of them.
Only LAZY developers make inferior games.... great games come from great programmers, not from great hardware.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think phones would replace consoles, either. But aside from that, which OS will the consoles run 5 years in the future.
Some food for thought: Android 3.1 supports Xbox 360 and Wii controllers (among other things). It's up to the apps to make use of that, of course... but the support alone makes me think that Google looks at more form factors than just phone and tablet.
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.
Thats all well and good. Unfortunately some of us take attacks on the First Amendment (squelching Geohot via DMCA) by a FOREIGN corporation seriously. What Sony has done here is not a trivial matter.
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.
Good-bye
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.
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.