Major Announcment From Sony Coming

[Ben]

Another photo of PlayStation 4 'prototype' controller surfaces ahead of Sony event | The Verge

Pics of the new controller have surfaced. Seems almost 100% that the announcement Wed will be about the new system.

 

[We Are Legion]

That LED display in the center looks interesting. Cant wait to see what it looks like lit up.

That headphones jack will come in handy too.

 

[ThatGuyFromNukemHigh]

My only problem is the shape, for years my hands have grown accustomed to the PS shape.

 

[Dale]

Kinda looks like the old PS controller before it had the analog sticks.

 

[NotReallyaGoodUN]

PlayStation 4 Revealed - IGN

Sony Clarifies PS4 Games' Price Point - IGN

Meet the DualShock 4 - IGN Video

Developers React to PlayStation 4 - IGN

Looks very much like a PC, with an AMD APU with 8 cores, and 8GB of GDDR5 with a Radeon graphics card. In case you guys don't keep up with PC gaming, it's pretty much what would constitute an upper mid range gaming PC today. However if they decide to release it in 2014 instead of Q4 2013, the hardware will already be antiquated by industry standards, but staying at the helm of hardware excellence isn't something which is fiscally possible for a console. (I'm guessing the 8GB of GDDR5 is shared between the main system and video card, 8GB of video memory by itself would be absurd, I'm guessing 6GB for the main system and 2GB for the video card, that would make more sense.) The game prices are not as bad as people feared, they will be ranging from 1$ to the tradition 60$.

Given that Sony have decided to go with an x86 architecture, added to this the fact that Sony has explicitly stated that the PS4 will NOT, repeat will NOT be backwards compatible, this has only reaffirmed my commitment to Windows gaming and the Playstation 3. I'm fully expecting Sony to support the PS3 and PS4 in parallel for a while, seeing as to how the PS2 was discontinued a whole 12 years after it's release.

And +1 to seeing the number of bad PC ports decrease, hopefully now they will as they will all be developing for PCs in different names anyway.

 

[We Are Legion]

I'm sure the main reason they didn't make the PS4 backwards compatible was to keep the price down on it since no one wanted to pay $600 for the PS3 last time. Making a system backwards compatible is essentially releasing two consoles in one. Luckily, my PS3 still works like a charm and likely will for a few years until they re-release the classics like they've been doing lately for the PS2 games.

 

[NotReallyaGoodUN]

Yeah, that would increase costs dramatically. Given that this is basically a PC and the PS3 is a completely different architecture, they would have to find a way to emulate it on hardware (Which I'm guessing would increase the price to PS3 levels, didn't the launch PS3 have a hardware chip built in for emulation.)

Plus, having two consoles selling for Christmas 2013 with a dramatically cost reduced PS3 would be the best path of action for Sony imo. People on a budget would gobble up the PS3 after GTA V's release.

 

[ThatGuyFromNukemHigh]

I still stand by the fact that if all you care about is backwards compatability then buy a Wii, it was the only thing that system ever did right, and getting the rights to consoles like Sega Mastersystem/Genesis, Neo Geo Arcade, & Turbographix 16 only made that point even better when you add in every Nintendo console from NES-NGC.

At this point, all I am thinking about is the PSN. Without being backwards compatible it is still possible that the PSN will keep the games already loaded to it, and if that is the case then I wonder if I would be able to keep my account, thus keeping the DL'd games.

 

[NotReallyaGoodUN]

Meh. Most of those consoles already have decent x86 emulators anyway.

Am I the only one who thinks that the "Playstation 4" doesn't deserve it's monicker. I know that the majority of the world's population and the members of this forum identify themselves as being middle class and therefore as a consequence cannot afford a new console at launch if it sported state of the art, cutting edge hardware, but surely this is a let down, at least specification wise, given that this is nothing more than a mid range gaming PC anyway. Screw that, it's not even a mid range gaming desktop, it's a mid range gaming laptop. The "Jaguar" CPU is used in netbooks, in case you guys didn't know, as opposed to the bulldozer/piledriver architecture used on PCs. The bulldozer/piledriver architecture uses non-igp motherboards with a dedicated GPU and the and the Jaguar is an APU which uses an integrated graphics card. (Of course, costs aside....a dedicated GPU and a high end processor would probably consume bucket loads of energy and god knows how much issues that would cause, Xbox 360 and red ring of death anyone?)

Given that Sony always projects a 10 year lifespan for their consoles (at least when it comes to shelf life) would I be foolish in predicting that this is the final generations of consoles? At least...as we know it?

I would use a Michael Patcher smiley if we had one, but instead I'll settle for :RO: