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PS4: What Sony Should and Shouldn't Do
donniebaseball23 writes "As a follow-up to his piece on Xbox 720, veteran games journalist Chris Morris has put together some thoughtful advice on what Sony needs to do (and needs to avoid) to ensure that the next generation PlayStation is a success. In particular, Morris notes that Sony must 'look beyond games' to create a fully fledged entertainment hub: 'Nintendo has been pretty adamant that it has little interest in content beyond games. Microsoft seems to be rushing to embrace the set top box world. Sony, though, seems a bit confused about what it wants.'"
It should be modular and have upgrade slots following ISO standard interfaces. Perhaps give the option of one or many Intel or AMD cpus and have different graphic options from both NVidia and ATI. Oh, and upgradeable storage & memory.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Don't advertise features that you may later remove completely
While I was not one of the ones who missed the OtherOS feature, for some it was a huge deal. I would hope the uproar over losing this option will teach Sony not to include and make light of large feature sets that they wind up removing later, after the fact. Regardless of what that feature may or may not be, I don't think it is cool to remove stuff that originally came with the system. I don't think anyone wants to see features disappear from a piece of hardware they own just because they want to stay up to date with the latest firmware/updates, and that doesn't just go for PS4 either.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Sales of the 3DS underwhelming? At the initial price point, before its flagship titles had been launched, sure. At the current price point, with those flagship Mario titles now released, the 3DS is absolutely *flogging* the opposition. By the beginning of December, the 3DS had already passed the 1st year sales of the original DS. What's more, the 3DS has sold more in its first 9 months than the *Wii* did in its first 9 months. The idea that the 3DS is doomed is preposterous. The way you're painting things with the "war on two fronts", and Nintendo being able to "fall back on" handheld sales, you make it seem as if Nintendo lost the home console war to the PS3 and XBox360. Just in case you missed it with the howling of "hardcore gamers" and fanboys, the Wii thoroughly flogged them. Seriously, Nintendo is in no danger at this point. I'm not saying Nintendo's done everything perfect, there's plenty of things they could have done a lot better. But their financials aren't really an issue. Nintendo made a loss, and people are making a big issue out of it, but it's really a red herring. Hell, a huge reason (if not the main reason) for that loss was the strong yen, not the sales performance of the 3DS.
You apparently haven't looked at hotcake sales for the past decade. You can't move hotcakes. You say you've got some hotcakes for sale, and people are like, "I want ice cream cake!" And then you have to explain that you mean pancakes. But now they just want ice cream cake, or frosted cake, and all you have is syrup-drenched flapjacks.
It's a sad life being a hotcake salesman, let me tell you.
All joking aside, citing current PS2 sales is hardly relevant, since the PS3 doesn't have the same kind of record: Nintendo's current generation has beaten the pants of the current generations of Microsoft and Sony, and the Wii U's reception has been similar to that of the Wii months before its release.
Pretty much, it's impossible to say how well the Wii U is going to sell, and I definitely wouldn't short Nintendo's stock quite yet. They're scrappy, scrappy fighters with a rabid fanbase that has absorbed what was left of Sega's rabid fanbase. That's a lot of rabid.
I'm a psychologist (amongst other things).
Which quite ironically, is pretty much just a snes pad with one extra l/r button with a knee jerk reaction to the n64's analog stick.
Interestingly enough, the PS controllers look like that because before Sony released the PSX, they were working with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM addon for the SNES (much like the Sega CD for the Genesis). Near the end of the project's completion, Nintendo decided to abandon the idea, when infuriated the president of Sony. Not too long afterwards, Sony came out with the PlayStation to rival Nintendo.
Here are a few things that I'd like fixed:
/add/ features, not remove them.
Get rid of load times. If I'm playing a game where I'm supposed to be immersed in it, a loading screen just kills the idea that you are part of the game. This isn't 1994 anymore.
Get rid of region locking on everything. Including digital downloads. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to enjoy a game even if it isn't translated into my language or "localized". Similarly, there should be some way to gift digital downloads seamlessly between regions.
Stop removing features. Updates are supposed to
Seamless emulation between consoles. Not having proper PS2 emulation I'm sure is a contributing factor to why the PS3 finished in third. When the PS2 basically defined the previous generation, it isn't a great idea to decide to make your next generation console compatible with it.
Better build quality. No red ring of death, yellow light of death, or an overheating GPU like the Wii.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nope.
Out of all three console manufacturers, Nintendo is in the least peril. First from the Billions the Wii made, next from the strategy Nintendo is following.
Nintendo understands that consoles are casual. They always were and will continue to be for casual gamers. The most casual console of the last three generations ended up being the victors.
I love Nintendo's classics, but their refusal to embrace online play on the same level of their competitors as well as their reliance on nostalgia titles is frustrating.
This is the opposite of most peoples experience with Nintendo. Most console owners dont want to play online competitively, they play for 4 maybe 5 hours per week so they simply want a machine that starts quickly and is easy to use as well as having games which are simple and fun to play.
Of all the console manufacturers, the one I'd be worried about is Sony. Sony cant afford another loss leader like the PS3, in five years the PS3 hasn't become profitable, let alone made it into the black. It took 3 years for them to stop selling the each unit at a loss. However this is not the problem. Nintendo has shown that consoles are casual, yet I doubt Sony has learned this, they still seem intent on chasing a more dedicated gamer which simply doesn't exist in sufficient numbers on the console. A PS4 with the financials of the PS3 will probably sink the entire PlayStation division given the utter failures of the Playstation Phone, Playstation Portable and PS Vita.
Microsoft will probably release an overpowered casual console, remaining decidedly indecisive but openly willing to chase the casual dollars. If MS is good at anything it's following the leader.
As for the Wii U, yep, it may be evolutionary rather then revolutionary but at least Nintendo is trying new things. It probably wont be the smashing success that the Wii was but unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo can afford for the Wii U to be lacklustre although I highly doubt it will be. It probably wont sell like the Wii did, but it will still do well.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Nice attempt to frame the argument.
But the Wii has sold a lot more consoles then Sony and Microsoft. Also remember that Sony had to significantly redesign it's console to stop it haemorrhaging money and Microsoft has also redesigned it's console as well as various versions (Arcade, Elite).
Wii, 1 production model: 90 million sold.
Xbox360, 4 production models: 66 million sold.
PS3, 2 production models: 55 million sold.
Telling me that sales of the Wii has dropped is simply saying they aren't selling as phenomenally well as they were when it was released, the same thing happened with the Xbox360. This simply indicates it's reached it's saturation point, not an indication of product failure. A slow down in sales after 5 years is normal. The PS3 on the other hand did not experience the majority of its sales after it's redesign.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The reason they abandoned it was because after looking at the fine print all game related profits where the media used was a cd would be going to sony... the profit from games was nintendo's bread and butter income.
Does anyone else have a nagging feeling that Nintendo is doomed in the next console cycle? The Wii U didn't grab the same attention that the original Wii did, and Nintendo is being attacked on two fronts--the hardcore market with the PS3 and Xbox 360, and casual gaming with the iPhone. Nintendo always had handheld sales to fall back on, but sales of the 3DS have been underwhelming, forcing an early price drop. It seems like Nintendo backed itself into a corner with the Wii, tying the company too intimately with the casual gaming market, whose gamers are fickle and prone to jump onto the next big thing, which turned out to be the iPhone.
Er, someone already corrected you about the 3DS comment, but I feel the urge to point out that the WIiU's graphics look amazing.
Here's the nightmare scenario for Microsoft and Sony, and why both of them tried to retrofit motion controls into their console:
The big joke of the last 3 generations is that Nintendo has put together under-performing hardware. You simply can't run the same amount of processing power on a Wii, Gamecube, etc as you could with comparable consoles. What they do have this generation is something the other two cannot compete with them over -- motion controls.
Now, the problem facing Sony and Microsoft is that Nintendo can now afford to put out a console with good graphics capability and keep the console very affordable. As any PC gamer knows, game graphics aren't getting any better. A sub $100 card is enough to run video games at a very respectable resolution and quality. You can bump up the AA, the filtering, the resolution by buying a bigger card, but all things considered, we've hit a plateau. What's more, the games aren't even using these advanced cards to their fullest -- and they can't. It's just too expensive to make games with these ultra quality graphics.
The WiiU will be able to play PC ported games. It will be able to feature match Microsoft and Sony, AND has features they cannot match -- high quality, 3rd generation Motion Controls and an integrated tablet for a second viewport and touch screen gaming.
So here's the question that the next generation is going to have to answer -- if the WiiU can play the same games as the PS3 / PS4 / XBox 360 / XBox Next, and can play the WiiU exclusive games... Why in the world would you ever buy the more expensive PS4/XBox Next?
Your link is blacked out today you insensitive clod!
> The big joke of the last 3 generations is that Nintendo has put together under-performing hardware
You're overlooking the 400-ton elephant wearing a pink tutu standing over in the corner -- 1080i60. As much as we'd like for it to be true, native 1080pAnything is far from universal. You'd be horrified if you saw the architectural mess inside most mass-market sub-$400 LCD TV controller ASICs -- it makes the parallelport-semi-SCSI-kludged-to-USB trainwreck that evolved with scanners look downright elegant by comparison.
The raw panels themselves can do 24p, 30p, and 60p without drama, but the brain-damaged controllers driving them were value-engineered to just kludge anything besides 720p60 the same way they always have -- they bob it (ie, they treat 1920x1080 16:9 interlaced video as 1920x540 16:9 progressive video, then resample it to 1366x768).
When presented with 1080p24, instead of just natively showing it at 24fps, they stupidly apply 3:2 pulldown to emulate 1080i60 and pass it to the same braindamaged controller. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that somehow managed to end up with weave artifacts out of 1080p30 source. And today's Walmart crap is the semi-high-end from 5 years ago.
Put another way, it's going to be at least another 10 years before you can confidently throw out 1080p60 video and expect butter-smooth artifact-free rendering on the TVs in most living rooms. With current TVs out "in the wild", modes like 1080p24 and 1080p30, let alone 1080p60, are too inconsistently-implemented to risk depending on... and true 1080i60 looks like crap on anything besides a 240hz set that uses oversampling to emulate interlace fade. So we get the least common denominator -- 1080p30 pretending to be 1080i60, that 10-20% of TVs still manage to screw up and butcher.
Of course, 720p60 works well on just about everything. Unfortunately, 720p60 isn't sexy enough for the marketing department. So instead of getting judder-free butter-smooth 1280x720 60fps video without glitches, and with enough filtering to be almost indistinguishable from real-life, we end up with 1080i60 video that looks like crap.
That's the sad truth. 720p60 isn't good enough for the marketing department, 1080i60 rendered AS 1080i60 looks like crap on most TVs. 1080p60 is a fantasy in 94% of the homes in America, 1080p24 is badly-implemented in at least a quarter of the TVs out there, and 5-10% somehow manage to even screw up 1080p30 encoded as fake 1080i60.