What to Expect from the PlayStation 4/PS4

Launch Games?

I think you know what I’m talking about… probably because of that picture. But yes, I’m talking about God of War here. I want a God of War game on the PS4, and I don’t want just any God of War game. I want a God of War IV- not a spin-off, not an HD remastered collection. I know that with God of War III the franchise’s story-arch more or less came to a close, but a semi-cliff hanging ending and several assurances by Sony and Santa Monica that we have not yet seen the last of this beloved franchise have made me sure of one thing- there will be a God of War IV, and most probably than not, it’ll be on the PS4.

Keep The Price Low… Meaning A Less Powerful System?

When the PS3 was released, it was released at the price point of five hundred freaking dollars. Of course, the price has now dropped drastically. But still, it leaves a bad impression on the minds of the gamers, and while the PS3 still sold out completely in most regions of the world, the high price affected its sales greatly. If Sony can keep the price of their next home console a bit on the lower side (mind, lower than the PS3’s, not so low that they go into loss), it would be really great for the customers- here is the catch though. Sony do need to make a lot of upgradations to the PS3’s processor and core, so they will have to spend more money on it, which means that to go into profit, they’ll need to have a price point higher than $500. It was reported that on each $500 unit sold, Sony was suffering a loss of $307, which means that the console would have to be priced at at least $850 for them to make any remarkable profit, and that is downright crazy. Now considering that Sony spend a 100 more dollars on the production of the PS4 than what they did on the PS3- that makes it around a thousand bucks for ever system they make. That is simply FUC|<ING crazy. If they sell it at a price to gain profit, it simply won’t sell, which means it would be a failure, again causing great deal of loss to the firm. They could probably look back 10 years ago when they launched the PlayStation 2 at a sweet price of $299!

This means that Sony will have to develop a system that is powerful, yet not overly powerful, so much that it costs them gallons of money. Possibilities? Maybe they could go the Nintendo way. Look at cheap processors for their system that work just as well, or almost as well, as the costly ones do. It’s a tough call, actually, but still, Sony will have to work a way around it.

Stop Loosing Exclusives To Your Competition

Final Fantasy XIII. Grand Theft Auto IV. Assassin’s Creed. Devil May Cry IV. Virtua Fighter 5. Beautiful Katamari. Final Inertia. And so many more titles that were originally PS3 exclusives, but soon made their way to other rivaling consoles. Sony simply hasn’t been able to keep their games to themselves. It was a wonder that they managed to keep Final Fantasy XIV away from the 360- and well, it isn’t turning out to be a very good decision, is it? Sony might want to take back franchises that were originally exclusive to them- Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, and if they can get biggies like Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil, it will boost their sales a hundred times.

Bottleneck?

It has been reported that the PS3 has a processor (Cell) that is a hundred times as powerful as the Xbox 360’s processor. However, the PS3 simply lacks the means to utilize all its powers. Much like the N64, the PS3 has a lousy GPU, and a RAM and DMA- which, stand alone, would be good, but are insufficient in their powers to support the super-powerful Cell. Thus, this results in a bottleneck situation, in which it is totally impossible for developers to make full use of the power processing chip. If they try to fully utilize the processor’s powers, they would be overloading the RAM and the GPU, and that would make the game unstable, and very crash-prone. Developers have started to get around somewhat satisfactory methods of avoiding this problem, but the PS3 is an eccentric system to develop games on, as developers like BioWare and Valve have stated so many times, that is why, most of this gen’s games are first developed for the Xbox 360, and then ported over, and sometimes refined a bit, on to the PS3. If only the PS4 doesn’t have as eccentric a processing unit, it will be a life saver for all developers.