The "likes of me"? ok. I'm a doctor. Do you have to be one to know that it's probably bad to swallow something that says rat poison written on it ?

And who are these dozens of devs that have spoken out you mention? Cause I can also show you a dev that has openly spoken for it. and unlike the rest of these devs that speak out he isn't doing it in hiding. 

But let's make this simple. 

Are you saying. that it's a LOT of work and completely unfeasable making something that's already running at 1080p on the PS4 to remain at 1080p on the PS4k? 

Are you saying that it's a lot of work taking something that's running at 900p on the PS4 up to native 1080p on the PS4k?

Even after considering the hardware bump in the PS4k as opposed to the PS4?

Do you realize that devs will treat the PS4k as an after thought and just code for the PS4 as per usual? Anyways. sorry if I offended you and if you are indeed a dev, but I also like you to know that I don't have to be a dev to have a pretty decent understanding of how game development works. I may not know enough to do anything more than make an Android app, but o do know enough to know what I don't know and can't do..... if that makes sense. 

Well Greg Zeschuk is one. He said supporting two platforms at once would “be a gigantic pain in the ass that flies in the face of the purpose of consoles.”

I agree with that sentiment. The same goes on the other end. Supporting the base PS4 10 years from now, as you mentioned? That'll also be a gigantic pain in the ass. Anything other than developing for one specific console specification is a giant pain in the ass in comparison.  It means more unpaid overtime. It means more time spent away from my family.  It makes our jobs more difficult. It's annoying. It sucks. It's completely unnecessary.

I never once said it's a lot of work. I said it's extra work. There's no denying that. In fact I said it will be substantially less work than maintaining a PS4 and X1 build. That doesn't change the fact that it's more work to be done on the same budget with the same hard release dates we have now. It's needless extra work to add on to the pile of work that already has to be done. It will suck for developers like me. It's going to suck even worse for the QA team, and there's no getting around that. It's not the same as changing the video output on your console - this is a seperate build of the game. QA pretty much has to treat it as a completely different platform. All that means is less time playing through the regular PS4 and X1 builds, which likely means that less bugs spotted, and less fixed. What I'm saying here is that this move has knock-on effects all the way down. Sure it's not going to break the industry, but its going to make the job more difficult, and the games won't be as "good" as they could have been without the PS4 neo introduced.

I get the impression that you think this is pretty much a matter of the new PS4 just supporting a new 4K output mode, so the console is going to do 99% of the work for you and all developers have to do is change the engines to support this new mode, hope their game runs in 1080p when they're done the engine work and if it does make sure the PS4K build doesn't break, pour money into testing it, and pretty much call it a day a day from there if nothing breaks. Honestly? That's not too far off what I'm describing above. Not a lot of work, but extra work that really really sucks. But that might not be the case depending on how the engine was designed. If they game developers adapted a PC engine to run on consoles that already supports multiple hardware configurations, adding one more isn't that big of a deal, but they were already bloated and not well optimized. But something that is built from the ground up for console development, like the engine Uncharted 4 is running on? You're going to have to rewrite large chunks of your engine. That could be a huge amount of work. The developers that have put the time and effort to get the most out of the PS4 to date are going to be hurt the most by this.

It just sucks. Games will suffer. Plain and simple.

If Sony figured out a way for the PS4K to do this in the background, to use the extra console power to take an pure sub-1080p rendering and channel the extra power to "boost" the rendering portion of the game to 1080p without developers doing anything (not sure if this is possible, I don't work on engine development)? Then you wouldn't really be hearing any complaints out of me, because then it would just be a PS4 with 4K capable video output. Not a big deal. It would all be the same to developers. As a console owner I really wouldn't care either as I would know that the only real perk of upgrading if I dont own a 4K tv is that the game will be outputted in 1080p. I don't need to worry if games will suffer. I don't have to worry that if Sony is going to drop support of the base PS4 3 years after the PS4 Neo is released. If it's all the same to devs, it's all the same to me.

It's really too bad it isn't.

Well said. Now to clear up some things. 

We really don't know anything about the PS4k. Or how or what exactly Sony intends for it. So there is that. 

Everything I said about Sony supporting this or that SKU for 10yrs or dropping this or that and changing the generational console upgrade model is all just an opinion. Based on nothing more than what I would call wishful thinking which I put up here on the forum to debate (as what forums are for to begin with) so that has no bearing on anythjng here. 

And you are right that I think it's that simple. You are also right that it's extra work, and it's possible that that work could have been better served fixing bugs and stuff. But that's taking an extreme situation and making it sound like the norm. Especially when we still have no idea exactly how Neo optimization will be implemented and what modifications will be needed on the engine side of things to accommodate it. 

I do like the example you made here. esepcially pointing out its effect for devs. And it only goes on to reenforce the point I've been trying to make. Today, 95% (made up number but probably true) of games have a PC version. And any game made on the PC have engines designed to cater to different output configurations of the game. As you said, in such cases accommodating a required 1080p version of the game for the PS4k will not be as much work as for an engine that doesn't have such parameters. 

I do understand that it's more work. But I firmly believe that it can't be that much more work to the point that entire development pipelines become more complicated and daunting esepcially if we take into account what kinda changes we are really talking about here. That part is really important. We are talking about 1080p being a requirement on a platform that already runs majority of its games at 1080p. Or for a SKU that has enough added muscle to basically brute force through the available code if increasing a preset from 900p to 1080p is required. We are talking of less than a 25% bump in resolution on a SKU that is providing about an 80% increase in processing power. (at least the part that deals with resolution). 

So I really don't think it's as big of a deal. Annoying to devs no doubt. But shouldn't in any way be game breaking or design breaking.

I too don't know how resolutions are handled. As there are games designed natively at 900p but output at 1080p. I don't think it's that simple with the PS4k. "yh, you can build at 900p and our box will output at 4k" cause if it were Sony wouldn't have made it clearly one of their development requirements that all Neo games must be native 1080p. I feel that has something to do with whatever upscaling method Sony intends to implement. 

Anyways. we will see I guess. 

I suspect you're right there, that the 1080p requirement is for Sony's 4K upscaler. It's a lot easier to develop something that is doubling the number of pixels length and width wise than it is to develop something that say, has to multiply the length by 2.3 pixels and the width by 2.1. They likely have some sort of 4K upscaling chip in the post-processing that when it's enabled takes a 1080p video stream and upscales it to 4K before sending it to the TV. That would make sense.

But Sony has to make that 1080p milestone as easy as possible on developers. In an ideal world it would be completely hands off. In an ideal world developers would not have access to this extra power, Sony would be leveraging this extra power all on its own.

If Sony wants to do this console, they need to come out on E3 and essentially lay out the next 4 years of hardware on the PS4.  As a PS4 owner I want to know how my console is going to be affected, if/when I can expect a PS5, if/when I can expect a PS4 Neo 2 etc. Sony needs to make their intentions very clear and they need to make it very clear how its going to affect core PS4 owners, PS4 new owners, and playstation owners beyond this console.  They need to lay out all of their cards and ask Playstation owners to buy in. If in 2 years time, the PS4 Neo is going to be getting exclusive games, I want to know about it right now, not in 2 years time. If they say that is never going to happen it better never happen.

Sony is playing a very dangerous game and both as a developer and a PS4 owner I am very very leary. This can all go upside very very quickly if Sony doesn't play this very well. I'm not looking forward to E3 at all. I fully expect to be totally disappointed with Sony's plan.

Everyone have the right to be pissed, this is a Stupid decision for something so in the Middle of the Gen, we still don't know if the PS4K, or PS4 Neo, exist, or if it Exist, if those are the actual Specs of the Console, we need to wait until E3, to  make Conclusions, i don't think that Sony, will launch PS4 Neo, and PSVR, at the same time, would make no sense to split the attention of 1 Product to another.

Not comparable.

Damn, where were you during the reveals :)

The original XBox One was going to require 24h check ins.
Physical games needed to installed and registered to your account, after which the disc would not be re-usable, merely an install disc that checks if the license isn't in use yet on another console. There were plans to allow some retailers to resell games for a fee, which would remove it from your account. Hence the mandatory 24h check ins to see if you still have rights to all your games.

Basically this would kill the free second hand market, no more ebay, no more lending to friends, only selected retailers. Plus no internet, no play.

After the initial backlash MS reveiled plans that you could share your games with upto 10 people by giving them access to your digital library where they could check out one of your games for a while. They never really made the details of this plan clear and speculations went from max 1 hour access (glorified demo) to groups of 10 people only having to buy one copy of a game with upto 2 people being able to play it at the same time on different machines across the country.

The whole DRM thing was scrapped and the game share plan never materialized. Consumers didn't want the former, and I guess publishers weren't too happy with the latter.


Anyway not comparable. Yet if few people buy the NEO it will be a short experiment as well. Ofcourse Sony could simply phase out the base model. It might be 349,- base + game, 399,- standalone Neo this year. Next year just standalone NEO at 349,- 399,- with game, no more base model.
Without a 299,- slim I expect sales to slow down. However if the NEO is a success somehow plenty of refurbished models will become available in stores from people upgrading.

In fact they had serious issues before Sega CD.  They were on a downward spiral of bad products until the Dreamcast and by then there was no going back.  Even a good product like the Dreamcast could not pull Sega back from the brink because others had even better products and Sega did not have enough fanatics left.

Sega 32x and Sega CD were part upgrades, wich means you hade to keep the original system to be able to use them. These upgrades cost $159($256 today) for the 32x and a whopping $299($509 today) for the Sega CD. Those are prices you pay for complete consoles not upgrades. Also back then there was no way to let older games take advantage of the upgrades, today with updates they can.

Most importantly though, Sega 32x and Sega CD games did not work on regular Mega Drive/Genesis sytems, every PS4 Neo game will run on original PS4 systems.

This "PS4K sucks becuz developer workload" is ridiculous.
Solely on basis of PS4 install base, it is already worthwhile even if it meant 2x the workload of PS4.0 only. (and it won't)
Even if PS4K doesn't result in net gain in sales over existing PS4 (i.e. the PS4k specific work is just a "tax" on PS4 game dev),
that existing PS4 base and sales trend makes it worthwhile.
If a dev didn't like the overhead of developing for a distinct platform, they would drop XBone based on it's install base/sales.
XBone actually IS a distinct platform with unique architecture, unlike PS4K which just beefs up PS4 platform.

The idea that "indy devs" would be most hurt is sillier just because those are not pushing hardware boundaries to begin with,
they are the most likely to already be at 1080p to begin with... And the PS4 install base/sales is still the best market for them to target.