Playstation 4 Announced
Sony has officially taken the curtain off the PlayStation 4 . . . sort of. The actual console wasn’t shown due to it not being finalized yet. This also provides Sony with an additional opportunity for positive media coverage whenever they do decide to show off the hardware.
The overall theme from all the presentations was that Sony is focused on making the absolute best video game console possible. It was great to hear how actively engaged Sony has been with developers to find out what developers wanted in a console.
As far as hardware specs go, things are pretty similar to what all the leaks have been saying. The PlayStation 4 will run on an AMD APU containing an 8 core x86-64 CPU and a GPU capable of roughly 1.8 TFLOPS. Just for reference the AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card is capable of about 1.8 TFLOPS. These two processing units will have shared access to 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. A more detailed description of the APU can be found here.
The console will of course feature a blu-ray drive, traditional hard drive, usb 3.0 ports, a gigabit ethernet port, wifi, and all the standard connection ports. There has been a lot of talk about support for 4k displays but this only applies to image and video files. There is no 4k support for games (you would need massive amounts of processing horsepower to make this feasible).
The console will also ship with a new controller, the DualShock 4. It looks pretty similar to the previous iteration but now includes a touch pad in the middle of the controller as well as a new share button.
The share button is part of a huge new push by Sony to make the console more social in nature. This means the PlayStation 4 will include features such as social network integration, easy video/screenshot uploading, and even being able to watch friends play. Out of everything we know about the console so far, this seems like the only part that could be a total bust. Gamers don’t have any burning desire to feed gameplay updates to social networks and no one fires up their console to watch other people play.
The fruits of Sony’s Gaikai purchase were also shown off. The PlayStation 4 will allow for games to be streamed. It was also mentioned that you would be able to demo games via instant streaming. Not sure if you want to put down $60 on some new release? Just turn on your PlayStation 4 and you can instantly start playing its demo to see if you like it. Streaming technology will also be used to enable people to play PlayStation 4 games on their Vita. This works by using the PlayStation 4 as a sort of server which streams out the content to the Vita.
Streaming will also be utilized to play old PS3 games. This is important because the change in hardware makes regular backwards compatibility impossible. It was mentioned that this would likely be something implemented down the road rather than being immediately available. The Eye camera system also gets an upgrade as it will now have two 1280×800 cameras with upgraded capabilities. It will also be able to interact with built-in light bars on the DualShock 4 controller.
Game announcements were the most exciting news of the night and surprisingly the biggest announcements were multi-platform games. Blizzard officially announced that Diablo 3 would be released on Sony consoles (and they’ll say the same thing at the Xbox 720 conference). Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, finally revealed his new game titled The Witness. It will be an exclusive launch for Sony initially but will end up multi-platform.
Square Enix also announced, but didn’t show, a new Final Fantasy game. Let’s hope they keep Western audiences in mind this time. Bungie announced that Destiny will also be released on the PS4. They also included a short gameplay clip which looked pretty impressive. Capcom proved to be the sleeper of the show with it’s Deep Down trailer which looked amazing. Capcom was mum about whether Deep Down would be a PS4 exclusive or not (which likely means not).
You can’t help but imagine that Microsoft is frantically trying to figure out how to one up this event. Sony has been quite clever with how it’s playing its cards. Just a month ago Sony said they would wait for Microsoft to reveal their hardware first. Kazuo Harai, CEO of Sony, said “”Why go first, when your competitors can look at your specifications and come up with something better?”
Microsoft likely felt like they were in a good place but shortly thereafter Sony announced the PlayStation event. The reality is that with the length of time it takes to develop a console, the point where major changes could be made has long since passed. Harai obviously knew this when he made his statement and he undoubtedly knew that they were about to have their own event.
As successful as the night was, the pressure is definitely on Microsoft. As stated earlier, Sony made very clear that their number one priority is to make an amazing video game console. This seems to be a somewhat divergent strategy compared to Microsoft who lately has been perceived to be focused on turning the Xbox into a broader multimedia/entertainment platform. The focus on childish Kinect games hasn’t helped that perception. Now there’s even chatter about Microsoft opening a television studio to produce original content for the Xbox.
Nintendo is on a downward fall with its Wii U. Sony made a superb first move with its PlayStation 4. The next move belongs to Microsoft.