Consoles and your gaming rig are obsolete by the time the money left your Paypal account to pay for them .. upgrading, constantly upgrading is the bane of today's gamer and software /hardware developer alike ...Nintendo have not done too great recently have they ?
The PlayStation 4 is going to be unlike other PC or console hardware ... because it will never be obsolete , never fall behind the latest and greatest PC gaming hardware , it may even allow cross platform gaming, doing away with the need for a PC or Steam Box or Nvidia Shield altogether.
We all know what is coming around the Sony mountain on 20.02.2013 now don't we? With not long to go to the reveal , this is thegamevedas take on how Sony may conquer all with the PS4.
Learning from the PS3
The PS3 was a fashion and hardware led design with the father of the PlayStation famously spending time and money chasing rights to the Spider Man font to adorn our old beautifully curved then next gen console. When it launched the PS3 , Sony had as they say game, a 10 year product life cycle ..sit back and rake in the money right ? Then the game changed ...but then again so has Sony...rolling necessary heads when necessary and learning from mistakes.
There are two prongs to Sony's PS4 attack , none of which rely on the hardware in the console itself. PlayStation Plus and GAIKAI ..
PlayStation Plus + GAIKAI = PlayStation 4 's Grooveshark for Gamers
Want to listen to a song...any song ...just Google Grooveshark and you are there , listening to Barry Manillow in seconds ... no downloads, no installs, no mp3 or media players... and no iTunes... Likewise who needs video Blurays, or downloads when you can instantly watch video through streaming?
When PS4 hits you are going to be able to game just as easily and this is how the PS4 is really evolving the gaming/media arena...And Sony owns the rights to a lot of that game , film and music ..all of which can be offered as exclusives through it's PS4 services ...
Over the last year of the PS3's shelf life Sony has steadily been weening it's fan base onto the cloud with PlayStation Home , some amazing free game offers,demos,cross platform gaming with betas like DUST 514 ,cloud saves introduced with PlayStation Plus ,which incidentally also hit the mobile Vita platform giving us instant game collections of real games many times the value of the paltry £39.99 yearly sub... The reason I have a new PS3 slim with a 500gb drive is to cater for this year of PlayStation Plus goodies ... Right now the coolest thing to happen to world of console or PC gaming is the PlayStation Plus sub model , it is like Steam really oughta should be with free AAA games ( as well as free to play games) , automated downloads and cross platform gaming. Now if Sony could just move into the PC gaming space too , just think we could have access to cross console,handheld , tablet , phone and PC gaming from one account and service. And for one sub fee you would get very real AAA games across all these devices.. As cool as this is , far better things are on the way from Sony , things that can and will make the likes of personal cloud streaming devices like Valves Steambox concept and Nvidia's not named after a contraceptive Shield look stale.
GAIKAI the Kingslayer
The old king of digital game distribution, no not Pirate Bay, but Steam is itself a stagnant , catatonic, stale and outdated dinosaur of a distribution service. Only recently has GabeN even contemplated ideas like Streaming or cloud services and having 1000s of games in your Steam account to download over and over again every time your PC dies or you move to another one just renders it a nice game collection archiving mechanism.... I know I own those games ( or do I ?) but I cannot be bothered to download them any more...
The PS4 is very much a beast of future times, look past the already obsolete hardware specs and you will see how Sony is making sure the PS4 will actually keep up with and run faster than the hottest gaming rig PCs way into the future ..... and it has nothing to do with the hardware.. in the console ...but out there in the cloud (read server farm in some dormant Icelandic Volcano...or Siberian mine shaft...)
For not so long ago Sony made Dave Perry an offer he could not refuse for his wonderful GAIKAI , the most capable cloud streaming service to date. GAIKAI makes hardware irrelevant . GAIKAI is going to be a major selling point for the PS4 as it will allow you to play any game from PC or console on your home console instantly. 0 installs . Instant demos , instant gaming. And this is the important part , 5 years from now your PS4 will look very old but through streaming it will still run games as fast your 2018 10K gaming rig ... that you will not need to purchase as your $300 console can run games just as well on your 1 gig or terabyte by then wifi connection...
We already know how powerful GAIKAI is , even the lowliest of PCs can run the most hardware intensive games ...
I can use GAIKAI to play Battlefield 3 on a Pentium Powered Toshiba Libretto , playing the game in one screen whilst surfing the web in another : Instantly 0 install ! When people worry about lag , or wifi streaming just point them to this video and consider the hardware in the PS4 and by that I mean wifi and streaming acceleration is going to be several generations ahead of the demos below.
Cloud gaming is not something the old PC hands like GabeN, or the Kinect happy Microsoft gaming supremos can either understand or control , they talk the talk of course ... but I say just let the people play ..so where Gabe would say Onlive and GAIKAI are not the way and it would take serious hardware like the Steam Box concept or Nvidia Shield to actually make even personal cloud gaming viable.. I say that is a complete and quite deliberate insult to your intended audience ..and we may have taken all that walled garden nonsense from Steve ..but Gabe come on ..you don't even have a mother ship HQ now do you ? mkay ? I have been cloud gaming on Atom and Intel GMA HD GPU and Ion powered tablets at gaming rig speeds and simultaneously too, even with 3 year old tech it is possible to use more than one cloud gaming service at one time on one machine irrespective of it's hardware with 0 perceived lag or slowdown...
So let's check this out and play Darksiders 2 using onlive and play Battlefield 3 at the same time, now just think about the stress that doing something like that would place even on a 10K worth gaming rig . With the cloud and what I call asymmetric cloud gaming we can use a low powered device to stream from a more powerful cloud server in this case on a dual screen tablet with a now ancient i5 first gen cpu and nothing but Intel GMA HD gpu... way below the specs of Nvidia Shields or the Steam Box basic config...and certainly way below the specs of the gaming rigs actually running the games...
Moving to a customer benefiting subscription model like PlayStation Plus and combining it with cloud based services for instantly streaming games is going to be essential for PS4 to stay relevant. Current hardware developers are following a terminal sales model .. even the mighty Apple is lost .. one two ,three , four hardware upgrades and models a year for what was once a New iPad .. none of which is raising the share price or in the slightest way approaching a Steve Jobs or as I like to remember him Harry Seldon moment...
In today's cloud happy world with so much content available for users , platform holders have to fight for our time and money, not just money. So cloud based instant gaming , with real tangible benefits if you pay for a sub ( as opposed to just paying for Xbox Live to be allowed onto a network) are the way to go , it is not enough to simply pack in faster hotter hardware and say you can connect to the Internet in some neutered fashion ... just look at the Nintendo Wii U gathering dust in the corner of your room ...
When the PS3 launched the Internet , cloud and gamers were not in the evolved state they are now , frankly I do not care in the slightest what GPU or CPU the PS4 uses ,I would like to see a display port and support of multiple displays and of course upgradeable wifi/ethernet . What I need to see is the easiest transfer from current PSN to the PS4 PSN of PlaySation Plus services and also Sony implementing and exploiting GAIKAI to it`s fullest potential...
I still see Sony eventually doing away with hardware altogether and just becoming a content distribution service ...across all our devices... any time any where...with GAIKAI the game you play on your PS4 is the same game , exactly the same game your will stream to your PS Vita 2 ..where ever you are ..and it will run as fast as your 2018 Gaming Rig ( or Steam Box if GabeN has his way with you.... ) ... all the technology is already in place , gamers are getting used to not owning their games ( thanks to Steam ) and the cloud is ready to serve...
And for the love of God ...just think ..never having to install another Metal Gear Solid game for 5 hours again..or wait for 2 hour long cut scenes to complete whilst the game installs or loads the next level....who am I kidding I love it really ...yes Sunny make those eggs over easy .....SHIIIIIIIINNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAKKKKKKUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!
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