It doesn’t matter what your own personal take on iterative consoles may be (for the record, I am on board with the idea), when it is all but evident at this point that we will be getting them going forward. And yet, resistance to something like this makes sense- after all, it is a change to the way things are done, an all new idea that changes the paradigm of console generations. Of course consumers aren’t necessarily a fan of something entirely new like this.
On the other hand, there are developers- how do they feel about something like this? What are their thoughts and opinions on the upgraded, improved hardware that these iterative consoles will allegedly have?
GamingBolt recently got in touch with Don Williamson, the former engine lead on the Fable games (and now the founder of Celtoys), and we decided to ask him his thoughts on the rumored PS4 Neo. Here’s what he had to say about it.
“I’m not really qualified to comment on the PS4 improvements as the last Sony platforms I worked on were the PSP and PS2,” Williamson said. “I don’t know enough to form an opinion on why Sony are taking this route. However, it does seem to me that both Sony and Microsoft may end up going down the route of “curated” PC hardware, instead of custom consoles, for the foreseeable future. The 4k goal sounds curious as it’s going to take a ton of horse power and memory to make 4k games; I would much rather the extra power was used for 60fps+ @ 1080p. If this ends up tightly integrating with Sony’s VR offering though, this could end up being quite a tantalizing platform.
And what were his thoughts on having more than one SKU per console, and how that may end up fragmenting development resources?
“If you target more than one platform you will always need to spend more money,” he stated. “How much more is too variable to generalize. However, even if you target the lowest common denominator you still need to spend time testing builds on the more capable platforms.”
On the whole, he, too, appears to be a fan of the prospect- which makes sense, as a tech focused guy, new technology is probably always an exciting proposition. Now the question is- can Sony and Microsoft sell the PS4K and Xbox 1.5 to consumers effectively?