The Case for the PS4K: an important, and necessary, change for the industry.
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
I doubt it. the slim had built in wifi that was cool but not the huge upgrade im anticipating "neo" to be
The problem is that people don't see this. They aren't thinking about the long term.
The slim didn't add anything the existing 360s couldn't already do, though. Wireless was already available via a USB dongle and they dropped non-HDMI connections in the final Slim version.
I didn't say it was the first, I said it is the reason the expectation now exists. Mobile has fundamentally changed mass consumer expectations; steam + ps360, not so much.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Agreed.
Well it did have one pretty crucial feature...
It was the first 360 that wouldn't inevitably brick.
Artvanderlay
Member
Meh. The current console cycles have served us well (as well as developers) for years. The power increase available each generation has been visibly diminishing, mid cycle upgrades only accentuate this.
The run up to and announcement of new consoles generates HUGE free worldwide publicity and interest exactly due to the lengthy gap . Wheres the excitement over short minor upgrages especially when these have been decreasing anyways .Consoles wont sell more for this.
The run up to and announcement of new consoles generates HUGE free worldwide publicity and interest exactly due to the lengthy gap . Wheres the excitement over short minor upgrages especially when these have been decreasing anyways .Consoles wont sell more for this.
Its not dumb if people care about better performance for the same games. There is a premium option for best performance and an economic option for basic performance. Its not all that complicated.
Forward compatibility isn't the rule, its the exception for these types of stop gap units. Its backwards compatibility that needs to be strictly adhered to in all cases
metareferential
Member
It doesn't matter.
And besides, they don't work like people expect. Google and apple accounts carry over all purchases between new phones.
Just like steam does. Consoles are lagging behind. Iterative hardware could solve this.
That's why the comparison with mobile phones is more apt more than ever before.
And of course it's out of shareholders' greed that Sony want to leverage its brand and its current market position. Same way as most people are worried that they'd be forced to buy something they can't afford every so often.
I am not a fan of this movement towards iterative consoles, but I think Sony could be handling it the best way possible if the leaked documents are true. I personally don't feel like a second class citizen if the newer console can play games slightly better. This isn't something that would make me stop playing games.
With each new gen came skyrocketing dev costs and starting from scratch with a new userbase. Look at how many studios we lost last gen and continue to lost this gen.
This allows devs to update their engines incrementally while still have a large playerbase to sell games to instead of starting over.
chaosblade
Unconfirmed Member
I'd feel better about it if they actually had standards for base PS4 versions and not just Neo.
And also if this is not a slippery slope that leads into actual annual upgrades.
NoctisVsStar
Member
ND engine is a prime example of this.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Bingo!
I don't think this is something to worry about.
Artvanderlay
Member
So increasing the number of consoles with different specs for developers to make games for reduces costs?? Has GAF suddenly become the twilight zone.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
This is just a function of who is eating the compatibility costs... Developer? CPU itself? OS abstraction layer?
If they stuck with a more powerful version of CELL, say 32 SPU's and two PPE's, they would reuse even more software... an enhanced RSX? Even less stuff to re-invent...
Yearly iterations are not a necessary or sufficient condition to achieve engine cost reduction due to a new generation starting.
A system with a Polaris GPU wouldnt need any HBM.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Oh but you ignore the fact it is x86/64 making PC porting that much easier, as well as their SDK tools, etc..
Not to mention most big developers have already structured their engines and scalability. It is far less cost, than a whole new reset I would wager.
But by then consoles may need to fit 32GB on a board, something HBM2 makes easier in stackable modules.
And GDDR5X will not be mainstream enough with the likes of HBM possibly taking that over... thus the more affordable option.
Hi GAF! 
I will admit that my first thoughts about the PlayStation 4 Neo have been somewhat sceptical. My concern has come from thinking that Sony have a market-leading console platform and them creating a spec-bump model will damage their business because of these reasons:
Disadvantageous of PS4 Neo
1) Gamers have always known that if they buy a console at launch the price will fall, but they can trust the manufacturer that the spec will last the entire generation, so they always have the current model. A change to this will upset early-adopters who made it a success but are rewarded with second-tier hardware.
2) Older consoles that have received a spec-bump (via a hardware add-on) have divided the market. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis improved performance, but effectively became a second platform with a much smaller install base.
3) PS4 Neo with half-gen spec improvements will diminish the performance improvement difference between PS4 Neo and PS5. Possibly damaging the excitement for the next-gen console and impacting its launch sales. (Maybe the Sega CD and 32x led to Sega fatigue and lessoned enthusiasm for the Sega Saturn?)
4) Many PS4 owners will sell their original model to buy the Neo, flooding the market with PS4s and lowering their resale value. But thinking about it there are some advantages:
Advantageous of PS4 Neo
1) The PS4 gets a mid-generation built-in spec-bump which will be available to new buyers and original owners who want it. This of course improves performance, but also stops games from looking so dated in comparison to their PC counterparts at the end of a console generation. It makes the games look relatively better for longer.
2) Sony have carefully made some rules for developers to prevent the PS4 & Neo market from fragmenting, namely that PS4 games are universal and work on both models. Original PS4 owners don't miss out on any games or game features. This really marks a paradigm shift for the home console market that mimics the smartphone app market. It means if you buy a PS4 game it will work on either console and avoids the Sega Mega Drive split.
3) Second-hand original PS4s available for a cheap price will lead to an expansion of the install base. Sony wont profit from these sales, but the install base will lead to a greater amount of new game sales, which they will profit from and a further standardisation of the PlayStation platform as the market leader and platform loyalty.
So, too early to say if this will work or be a failure but certainly is a big change for the industry. I dont know the degree of performance improvement a PS4 Neo will offer, but if it means PS4 games like The Elder Scrolls VI, Uncharted 4 and Horizon: Zero Dawn can be played in 1080p 60fps then that is enticing to me!
I will admit that my first thoughts about the PlayStation 4 Neo have been somewhat sceptical. My concern has come from thinking that Sony have a market-leading console platform and them creating a spec-bump model will damage their business because of these reasons:
Disadvantageous of PS4 Neo
1) Gamers have always known that if they buy a console at launch the price will fall, but they can trust the manufacturer that the spec will last the entire generation, so they always have the current model. A change to this will upset early-adopters who made it a success but are rewarded with second-tier hardware.
2) Older consoles that have received a spec-bump (via a hardware add-on) have divided the market. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis improved performance, but effectively became a second platform with a much smaller install base.
3) PS4 Neo with half-gen spec improvements will diminish the performance improvement difference between PS4 Neo and PS5. Possibly damaging the excitement for the next-gen console and impacting its launch sales. (Maybe the Sega CD and 32x led to Sega fatigue and lessoned enthusiasm for the Sega Saturn?)
4) Many PS4 owners will sell their original model to buy the Neo, flooding the market with PS4s and lowering their resale value. But thinking about it there are some advantages:
Advantageous of PS4 Neo
1) The PS4 gets a mid-generation built-in spec-bump which will be available to new buyers and original owners who want it. This of course improves performance, but also stops games from looking so dated in comparison to their PC counterparts at the end of a console generation. It makes the games look relatively better for longer.
2) Sony have carefully made some rules for developers to prevent the PS4 & Neo market from fragmenting, namely that PS4 games are universal and work on both models. Original PS4 owners don't miss out on any games or game features. This really marks a paradigm shift for the home console market that mimics the smartphone app market. It means if you buy a PS4 game it will work on either console and avoids the Sega Mega Drive split.
3) Second-hand original PS4s available for a cheap price will lead to an expansion of the install base. Sony wont profit from these sales, but the install base will lead to a greater amount of new game sales, which they will profit from and a further standardisation of the PlayStation platform as the market leader and platform loyalty.
So, too early to say if this will work or be a failure but certainly is a big change for the industry. I dont know the degree of performance improvement a PS4 Neo will offer, but if it means PS4 games like The Elder Scrolls VI, Uncharted 4 and Horizon: Zero Dawn can be played in 1080p 60fps then that is enticing to me!
Absolutely! This is the point that everyone fretting about developers seems to be missing. Generational transitions are devastating events that are fun for consumers but a complete nightmare for developers and publishers. This is an attempt to balance things a little.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
The biggest advantage new console generations will have is that there is probably enough juice left in the current GPU resources : CPU resources ratio as manufacturing processes progress and as engineers find new architectural tricks to extract performance with. Engines are already task oriented massively multi threaded beasts and programmers everywhere are getting more and more accustomed to using GPU's as general wide processor arrays for general computation.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Yep.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
This is a possible side effect of handling shorter console iterations in a certain way and with multiple generations overlapping. Backward and forward compatibility are not intrinsic benefits of releasing more consoles.
If PS5 came out in 2 years instead of PS4K now and it contained 8 Zen cores at 3.2 GHz, 16 GB of unified memory at 4x the current bandwidth, and a customised for BC next generation AMD GPU (they are processors with their own ISA, it cannot just be dropped in without anyone paying a BC price...)... You would reap the same benefits you are praising now.
There is an argument that even with the same exact arch having a huge performance boost may be more difficult to handle than several smaller boosts in a row, but I do think it is overblown.
Reckless Onion
Member
but how long before you stop supporting the lowest common denominator?
This doesn't make sense in regards to the PS4 Neo as they have to support the console that already has 35 million users. You will see non support when the PS5 roles around.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
What does this have to do either shorter overlapping generations?
Sure, but good PS3 developers designed with the same scalability in mind, but with PS4 the SSE/AVX units on the CPU cores are not a good match for the power and flexibility of the SPE's and it is not easy to drop the code you ran on SPE's straight on the GPU as you do have a whole different latency game between general purpose code and vector processing heavy calculations by splitting the workload on chips optimised for a very different scope (latency adverse/minimisation vs more latency tolerant).
Oh please. Considering we're paying $400 for these systems, on top of $60 a game plus annual subscription fees, so they should. As consumers we should be demanding as much, not less. Devastating is also completely dependant on how the publisher or developer chooses to invest their resources or manage their engines, and it's not exactly without reward either. Spending time and money on advanced graphical developments and more ambitious design is an investment in itself, intended to draw dividends in terms of sales and marketing interest. Also, not all engines are as advanced or ground breaking as the next. You can't tell me the Fifa team for EA for example, have have been devastated adopting their engine for this next gen. That shit still looks terrible and last gen.
Let's stop giving developers even less reasons to put in the effort, time and resources.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Because you are choosing to see it as a 'shorter overlapping' generation... where others see it as expanding the generation not unlike the PC sees.
I do not hear devs (or people) screaming about new CPU's and GPU's that are yearly... due to the fact it is within the same ecosystem with the tools just being added upon, and they are building engines to scale. Now developers can take more risks (be more comfortable) in their engine predictions, and not be so apprehensive in fear the next gen shift will be something totally exotic from the last one. It is clearly cheaper than a reset. Many, even big publishers stated this years ago.
gundamkyoukai
Member
You are forgetting that in 2 years that might not be affordable for the company .
They might have to wait for 7nm to make that possible in a consoles .
There is more than one factor to look at .
People separating them but you have to look at everything .
Pokemaniac
Member
The porting benefits of x86 have less to do with those being used on PC and more to do with it not being absurdly hard to work with like Cell was.
I don't think the games will be held back too much by PS4 because it has a Base mode & Neo mode.
Neo mode don't have to run on PS4 so it can use effects & so on that would slow a PS4 down.
Never said anything about it reducing costs, but it does soften the blow. A new gen comes a long and a developer has to create a whole new engine to service that hardware. It costs money. Add to that fact they are starting with a playerbase of essentially 0.
This method allows them to update their engines and still have a playerbase of 50-60 million to sell to. The architecture in these machines is essentially the same just different specs. Also I'm sure Sony has some great tools to help the transition even smoother in creating the base game and Neo games.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
What are they going to do in 2-3 years after PS4K assuming it hits this year? PS5 in 5 years after PS4K? PS4.5K necessary?
An iPad 3 to iPad 4th generation kind of refresh in the cards too
?
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Goodness.
We are saying the same thing. However, I am adding that since consoles are not x86/64 based, it is more cost effective for third party devs with PC in the picture. Everything is very 'familiar' and scales far better than exotic hardware to PC.
The market will eventually decide that. Of course over the course of time the "base" PS4 model will be phased out of retail and the PS4Neo will take it's place as the cheaper option and the PS5 will be the premium model.
SwordStruck
Member
Porting benefits of x86 are a direct result of it being the standardized PC platform for decades.
gundamkyoukai
Member
What are they going to do in 2-3 years after PS4K assuming it hits this year? PS5 in 5 years after PS4K? PS4.5K necessary?
An iPad 3 to iPad 4th generation kind of refresh in the cards too
What ever the case they have more room to play around in 3 years than they do in 5 to 6 years gen .
Which would be another point of this as i said they are many factors at play here.
With everything X86 and standard PC GPU, even a much larger update wouldn't be devastating at all... Suddenly, their codebase would start flying, run much faster, and that's about it. Devs won't have crack the cell 2, they won't have to optimize for an in-order CPU, but program for GPU's with almost identical features, optimize for CPU's of very similar output, where the large pool of RAM is unified (Minus the ESRAM woes, which MS could replace with a big upgrade while maintaining B/C, my guess is they'd less likely be able to ditch the ESRAM if they go iterative)
The biggest hurdle devs will face in the future is adapting to 4K, asset and fidelity wise, not the much powerful console.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
gamerMan
Member
Interesting OP. I disagree with your whole games as a service thinking. I like the idea of games as a service but this is as far away as possible against that idea. It's actually going in the opposite direction and basically a stop gap measure for hardware that should evolve on a daily basis.
The way it should work is that we pay a annual/monthy fee to access Playstation content. People shouldn't have to buy hardware as the hardware could be rented out to people. Instead of releasing new hardware every couple of years, Sony could have just given us an empty box that you plug in your controllers to. This is games as a service as we only pay to play games not for the hardware every couple of years. When I buy cable, I don't pay for the hardware.
In fact all the hardware upgrades could be made remotely as the set top box simply connects to the Playstation universe. This way the hardware could be upgraded at any time. We are are a long way from he games as a service model as our Internet connections are not fast enough to deliver high resolution games as a service.
The way it should work is that we pay a annual/monthy fee to access Playstation content. People shouldn't have to buy hardware as the hardware could be rented out to people. Instead of releasing new hardware every couple of years, Sony could have just given us an empty box that you plug in your controllers to. This is games as a service as we only pay to play games not for the hardware every couple of years. When I buy cable, I don't pay for the hardware.
In fact all the hardware upgrades could be made remotely as the set top box simply connects to the Playstation universe. This way the hardware could be upgraded at any time. We are are a long way from he games as a service model as our Internet connections are not fast enough to deliver high resolution games as a service.
But the only way to get people to actually upgrade is to restrict certain features and games to the latest Playstation model which will cause a backlash for Sony since it will split the user base. From what was in the GiantBomb article about the PS4 NEO, it seems that Sony is trying to avoid creating these differences. If there is not much of a difference between the old and new, people will not upgrade and those that haven't bought a PS4 yet will choose the cheaper of the two options.
To me, it sounds like iterative hardware will just create more confusion and hardship for both developers and consumers alike. Also, developers will develop for the platform that has the most users - not the platform that has the most technical capability. What if the adoption rate is slow for the new console? Developers have to put their games where the people are. Sony is just introducing unnecessary strain on itself by going through the costly process to develop and release a console on a more frequent basis. That's why I think this is a bad business decision for Sony. It's not like the company hasn't made bad decisions on hardware before (e.g. Vita, Vita TV, PS Move, PSP Go)
Trying to transform the console business into the same business model followed by mobile is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The Artisan
Member
i'm not afraid, i'm angry. i don't like that the industry is heading this way, and in several similar threads i've explained my stance and perspective of the situation. I even PM'd a gaffer who asked for an expansion of my opinion when requested, but dude never responded.
as far as technical reasons go, the facts, like you said, that i've used in my argument in this thread was sales.
i haven't paid that much attention to the thread other than my own discussions with others, although I have seen the "second class" thing in some posts. it's not baseless dude. i've had rational discussions with you before so i'll tell you this: try to be empathetic. you are on board with iterative consoles, cool, but it should not be that difficult for you to try and understand why so many people are upset. it's understandable to be upset; it could just be that people here are letting their frustration cloud the comprehensiveness of their posts and their posts may just come off as passionate and baseless, but there is a basis to it.
and the other thing is (not saying you, but a lot I have seen here on GAF) - if people feel like they are being betrayed or whatever, or second class, or that it's just in general the wrong way for the industry to go, and they're saying things like just sticking with PC or quitting gaming (like me, although admittedly I think I might be the only who said that) it isn't in your place to judge. it's a decision made on our own merit.
That's a worse Dev and Q/A nightmare; at least, currently PC's, Xbox One and PS4 all support roughly the same set of effects, with varying fidelity. You are over-simplifying these things like when you predicted PS4K could support 4K resolutions entirely transparent to the developers.
The Artisan
Member
welcome back.
Cheers mate.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
I will say this one more time.
I already said I understand where people are coming from, wether it is financially, not liking change like most humans or animals, or any of the PERSONAL reasons. I am NOT JUDGING THAT!!!
My comments are more in reference to those who are transparent, and you can see they are too embarrassed to speak what the personal issues are, so they report to spreading unfounded/undocumented/unproven FUD as a basis.
And you should not be taking any of it personally, since I said multiple times, (not you), but rather commenting on the topic at hand.
I am just saying for people to just be honest.
UnwrittenZero
Member
Isn't the hardware cost built into the the monthly cost of your cable and installation fees? You get nothing for free they could do that and come repo your hardware if you drop a $40 a month PlayStation plus fee but they don't. Because people would throw a fit as they should. Would you be okay if your games become a brick you can't use if you didn't pay a monthly fee?