When Nintendo ruled, Sony broke in by courting game developers. Then, they became arrogant, and made the best hardware they could, they was difficult to use. Thus, Microsoft won, simply because it was easier for developers. It was then amazing to see how arrogant they had become with the xboxone trying to squeeze everyone, in every way - similar to how they removed the ability to cancel xbox live online.
What Microsoft didn't realize is that they didn't win - Sony lost, by shooting themselves in the foot. But in this generation, if PS4 is easy to develop for, cheaper, more powerful, and not trying to squeeze every cent and control every aspect... things will be different.
Of course, Microsoft will see their mistake and adjust (as they've done many times). But while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. Also, next year, mobile devices should reach GPU parity with last gen consoles... and with their faster iteration cycle, match PS4/xboxone three years after that. (unlike CPUs, GPUs scale really well).
The Playstation 3 is based on 2004 era (cut down G70 )chip designs, so you're talking mobile devices next year catching up with a chip that's almost ten years ago, based on a 90nm processor node. Today's PS4 will be based on a 28nm node, there's no way in 3 years you're going to shrink the PS4 GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 to fit into an iPhone like device and not heat up like a welding torch and drain the battery like a blackhole.
It's a common, but incorrect assertion that mobile devices are going to replace game consoles. It might replace them for casual gamers, but not hard-core gamers. I don't know anyone who wants to play CoD or Half Life 2 on a mobile device. They want to play them on a high end PC, console, or SteamBox.
Probably not likely, but I'm not going to make any absolute claims about anything.
Microsoft unequivocally won the 360/ps3/wii console generation. Not because they shipped more consoles, no console maker actually makes the majority of their profit from raw console shipments, it's a very misleading figure. What matters more are sales of games and DLC and subscriptions to services. In those measures the 360 has been trouncing every other console maker. People who own 360s spend more time playing the console, they spend more money buying physical games, and they spend more money buying DLC and subscribing to xbox live gold. Microsoft does more business on higher margin items than other console makers.
The Wii made ok money for Nintendo but the sales dropped off really fast, and people didn't end up playing it much, or buying many games for it. The PS3 took a long time to reach a state of maturity where there was a sufficient stock of good games on the console to actually justify owning one. And eventually the PS3 managed to get to a state where it was actually doing well. But from a business perspective no matter how much better it was doing the 360 continued to outpace it (in game sales especially). These are some of the major reasons why there even is a new console generation this year, Nintendo and Sony need to put themselves on a new footing in order to have a chance of growing their market share.
"When the PS3 launched, according to most estimates, Sony controlled about 70 percent of the console market. Seven years later, it’s on even terms with Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the U.S. for 32 consecutive months."
Going from 70% to "even" with Microsoft seems like a non-win?
Second, you state while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. We still don't know how the dice will land in this regard. Microsoft managed higher-than-expected frequency yield, and nobody knows where Sony's chip sits. It also remains to be seen how the SRAM vs GDDR5 plays out.
Bluntly, Sony got it right with the PSX in making it very approachable for developers. They messed that up with PS2 and they should have learned that then. Instead they doubled down on the same misguided approach with the PS3 to predictable results. I'm glad to see they're not going to make the same mistake again.
Source: I was a subcontractor on a PSX title years ago.
What makes the Xbox One hardware interesting is the Kinect.
If mobile GPUs will reach a point where they are good enough, thats an entirely different story, but that still leaves you with subpar controls and very casual games.
I also dont think it matters much if the XBox One is a tiny bit slower than the PS4, console exclusive titles will get even more rare in the future and the difference in visual quality between the due is negligible, as in hardly to be seen by the human eye.
The one huge difference is the input method, which will always hold tablets back.
It's a level of the main game, but they are actually releasing it for $29. Taking this approach to the next level!
The interesting upstart this time seems to be the SteamBox.
Likewise with chip multiprocessors vs systolic arrays: making a core fully general and with proper cache coherant memory access isn't that expensive in transistors, and allows you to leverage existing multi-threaded code.
Systolic arrays still have a future in true embeded devices: radar processing is a good example.
Oh, and before you point to the AMD architecture as being Cell-like, it's not at all. Unified virtual memory instead of Cell's complex 2 level store. Cell requires the CPU to manage DMA's to the APU's, on Fusion you can just pass a pointer. CPU and APU instruction sets are entirely decoupled on Fusion. APU supports thread pre-emption.
In any case, the lesson here is obvious: design hardware in opposition to the existing software ecosystem in your industry, and you'll make something that is academically interesting but struggles to deliver value to end products.
It'll be interesting to see how Intel's x86 SoC development pans out. With the Atom they weren't really aiming for the SoC market and only recently have they actually bothered to try to do so. Even with their first generation stuff they've produced pretty competitive, to ARM, results, given Intel's research muscle and their FAB capacity it wouldn't be surprising to see a lot more x86-SoC based smartphones and tablets hitting the market in the coming years.
Intel made the same mistake with the IA64/Epic/Itanium architecture. They were banking on that to be the future of high performance computing and then AMD kicked their ass by using an iterative approach with x86-64. The irony is that today the Itanium architecture is actually pretty good, finally, but it's been relegated to a tiny market niche.
They initially officially supported Linux on the Playstation 3, but later decided not only to remove the feature from new models, but reach out through the cloud to remove the feature from existing consoles [1] [2].
This is also the company that put rootkits on CD's [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886509
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...
It makes a lot of sense to just a build a piece of it first — but that piece needs
to be representative. You can’t just hack something together.” He calls this
prototype a “publishable first playable,”
A little bit of a bummer, but we'll all forget about it in a year or two :)
If you really did, then pick up a used ps3 or 360 for about £50 and get the PS4 later!
I bought my kid the new Lego Batman II for PS3 in March for his birthday. We decided to upgrade to the PS4. He can't play this new game - that was recently released - on the PS4. It's a weird thing to not support backward compatibility IMO. It's a win for the developers/Sony but a loss for consumers. I have to now buy all new games and Lego Star Wars isn't going to be any better on PS4 than on PS3. Your question acts as though there should always be this "evolution" going on but I disagree. I like watching Daffy Duck from the 1940s - I don't like watching the Daffy Duck from the 1980s. Sometimes a game is "really good" and doesn't need revving - it just needs to be made available for the current gen console.
Well, I understand the clean break was necessary .. since their architecture strategy sort of requires it .. but its still a nuisance that we're confronted with yet more consumerist ideals being marketed as 'features'.
I don't get what the hype is about.
Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper.
As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgrade it as I go.
The positive thing I see is the PS4 <-> PC game portability. No longer developers need to have to very different engines and codebases. That's why PS4 is a much better option than XBox One in my eyes.
You've belied the true strength of video game consoles. A single configuration means less testing work and a streamlined experience for consumers. Not everyone is willing to deal with graphics drivers and endless installers.
To be fair this is much simpler now than it was 5-6 years ago.
Not everything can be reduced down to specs and numbers. Everyone has different use-cases.
> stuck in one configuration
This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations.
And just in reliability and testing. You can be sure that your exact hardware, with a nearly identical software load has been tested countless times. This is why you can often find games run much smoother on a 5 year old machine, to a modern PC.
Additionally API's are significant the fact that I can allocate memory directly on the PS4, and know that it won't ever be paged to disk is pretty significant. Additionally, Sony's rendering API's are much closer to the actual hardware, which give you much more flexibility in usage.
Then there are a few differences in the particular set of hardware that give it a good advantages to current PCs notably all 8 gbs of memory is GDDR5, which is very fast. And additionally, it's all shared, and cache-coherent between the GPU and the CPU which is really quite significant.
This is most obvious near the end of a console's life after developers master the hardware. Compare launch games and final releases for any console.
PS4 isn't really close to an existing set of APIs, although it's possible that Mantle (AMD's low level graphics API) is the same or very close to the PS4 graphics API. There are low level specifics like unified memory, asynchronous compute, and Xbox One ESRAM that make neither system look like current PCs, although future PCs might adopt them through new API specs or hardware configurations.
Steam Machine fits your description more accurately, but even it's a little weird in that a lot of games don't support Linux.
It's a video game console. Genuine question: what's confusing here?
Video game consoles are entirely about experience. PC gaming and console gaming are entirely different. It's not just about graphics, it's about the controller, the immersive experience of playing on a TV screen in your living room (I know PCs can do that too, but for the average person it can be a hassle to set everything up).
For developers it's a single target that never moves.
Peoples' love for consoles is shown by the fact that many people still play on consoles that are 10-25 years old. I still play games on a PS1 occasionally.
The good thing is that games will be made faster and with less difficulty. That will obviously improve game quality since it will reduce game making costs, I guess it will take much less time to make an engine and maintain it.
As for your comparison with a PC, you should not compare those, because all console are the same, which allows programmers to target a single configuration and optimize as much as possible, while on PC, programmers have to adapt their code for different configurations and drivers, but also require to offer multiple options to adapt to each configuration because PCs never perform the same.
To sum it up, there are no "minimum configuration" when releasing a game on console. Console have a better performance/price ratio. The PS4 would really make an interesting platform now that's easier to make a game on it, especially if it's dedicated to games, not like PC where the OS can suck a lot of resources you might want to allocate on your game.
It's like comparing JavaScript to native apps. Yes, sometimes JS can be pretty close and JS on powerful hardware can even beat native code on a weaker platform on some tests. Yet it would be very naive to think that JS nowadays runs faster than any native code on 10 y.o. hardware. Similarly, it will be a long while till DirectX/OpenGL apps will be unquestionably faster than native GPU code.
Not even. Actually for a repackaged PC (which is more or less what it is), I find the launch price relatively expensive. I have also heard that both Sony and Microsoft took the strategy for this generation to make money on the hardware itself from day 1, so they are not selling anything at loss, apparently.