PlayStation 4 in 2012?
According to this rumor, obviously not confirmed by Sony, the console would mount the body-tracking technology that Microsoft has launched with the Kinect as standard. The source states that the new console should be assembled by the companies Foxconn and Pegatron Technologies of Taiwan, an all in all logical consideration given that these are the same companies that currently produce the PS3.
Even if it is a actually intriguing story, there are many considerations to make in favor of this prediction but also against: let's see them together starting from the latter.
The prospect of having a Playstation 4 in the next eighteen months, assuming that the new console Sony's name is that, it is considered by many industry analysts unlikely if not completely unrealistic, for various reasons.
PlayStation 3 has only begun to be profitable in the last few months thanks to an installed base of over fifty million pieces: the Japanese manufacturer therefore intends to monetize the enormous losses accumulated with the launch of the current generation due to the fierce competition with Microsoft. Above all, the PS3 has yet to drop substantially in price and the 200 euro threshold will mark a turning point that will significantly increase sales.
Foreclosing on these earning opportunities by "committing suicide" a platform that is only now starting to bring money home is a prospect that makes absolutely no sense from a purely commercial point of view. A launch in 2012 seems unrealistic also for a whole other series of reasons: the first is that the video game industry is notoriously a place where it is very difficult to keep a secret. Everyone knew the characteristics of the PSP2 (now Vita) well in advance as early as 2009, or two years before its actual arrival on the market.
The recent announcement of the Wii U at the last E3 took place in detail thanks to the statements of the developers, and even at the end of the fair, new and entirely plausible rumors continue to arrive on what will be the final characteristics of this platform.
Conversely, in addition to this shocking announcement, we have not heard absolutely anything of the kind about the PS4: no tip to journalists, no significant notes on the arrival of the development tools. From them, in all likelihood, the first confirmations will arrive on the fact that something is moving about it.
Even the long gestation period of Vita suggests that Sony engineers have not had all the time in the world to start developing the hardware specifications and the related development tools, superimposing the gestation of the portable console on that of the new home platform.
What if it were all true? There are many considerations that allow us to give the DigiTimes article more than a glimmer of credibility.
The first concerns the fact that the next console should integrate a motion sensor: we know for sure that the SCEA's research and development team have spent the last few months trying to carry out the best possible reverse engineering process on the Kinect to propose a revised and corrected version of the "motion" interface launched by Microsoft.
The confirmation comes from a request from Sony last year regarding the registration of a similar device that should marry the Move to take Sony's body tracking to a new level of complexity.
Another issue, which makes this indiscretion worthy of consideration, concerns its origin: Far Eastern manufacturing companies have long been a reliable source of information. From there, in the past, the precise dates for the start of production of the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 arrived long before Apple's marketing communicated it.
The same thing happened for the PS3 Slim, available on a Philippine marketplace many months before the official debut at Gamescom 2009 ...
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Watch on YouTube. In addition to if, how and when, another topic of considerable interest is also the reasons behind why Sony should aim for such a hasty launch of its new generation. The first rumors said that a possible Playstation 4 would be a more powerful version of the PS3 however based on the pre-existing architecture.
This is to allow developers who took several years to learn how to exploit it to pass to the next generation without any particular trauma. For this reason, a PS4 version doubled (or tripled in terms of CPU, GPU and RAM) but characterized by the same software infrastructure is more than plausible.This simplification would also explain the speed with which it would have reached the new generation, or a consistent approach with the preservation of the know-how of the developers but which allows to create an exponentially more powerful console than the previous one in relatively short times.
With Nintendo that has already unveiled its cards on the WII U and Microsoft strongly suspected of doing so during the next E3, everything could point to the fact that Sony also sees 2012 as the year of the presentation of the new hardware followed by a launch after about ten months. This also with a view to beating Nintendo on the Japanese market, carving out a year of advantage over Microsoft in the rest of the world.
Fantamarketing mental ruminations aside, the words of an undisputed leader in the graphics engine sector such as John Carmack cannot be overlooked, according to whom the current generation of consoles is currently far from being exploited 100%.
In terms of knowledge of hardware and software, a second generation would not be exploited properly for a long time. To which the cases are two: either the three producers want to approach the market in a different way or the technological leap between the two generations will be so clear as to make the current games seem immediately obsolete. Perhaps a combination of both reasons is the most plausible.
However, the impression is that such reasoning betrays a certain haste on the part of Sony and Nintendo, definitely a bad advisor when priority must be given. be making a winning product over the long term and not necessarily arriving on the market before the others.
Microsoft seems the least pressured about it and for this reason the suspicion is that the next-gen is less around the corner than you think. However, one thing is certain: the 2012 E3 will certainly be much more interesting than the one just ended.
