Who thinks there will be no PS4?

[amirnetz]

OK. I am going to be the odd man out.

I say no PS4. The problem: there will be no new gen.

A new gen means a market reset. The cards are reshuffled and anyone can win. This is great for the existing losers. Bad for the current leaders. The leaders have the interest to prolonged the gen as much as possible. Forever is a good timeframe as far as they are concerned. The larger the install base, the more money they make.

At this point, the only platform who would love to have a "do over" is Sony. Everybody else found a successful business model that makes them healthy amounts of money and none of them would like to risk it.

So can Sony do a new gen all alone? NO.

The current HD gen can support excellent titles and with evolutionary improvements to the HW can move forward towards 3DTV, IPTV, DVR and motion controls without changing the foundemental architecture. You will see a Mark II, Mark III etc to the platform, but no disruptive departure from the current architecture.

As far as the developers are concerned it is best to be able to sell to a large install base. A reset and a new gen is bad for them as well. There is just no good reason for them to support a new Sony platform. The cost of current HD titles is already immense and the only way to recup the costs is to sell to a huge base. A new platform will be even more demanding than the current gen and development cost will be even higher and at the same time the installed base will be minimal. Just bad for them all around.

So the potential PS4 will cost much more than the current gen units, will burden Sony with Billions of R&D costs and will have little to no title support.

Even Sony will be able to see that such a PS4 will never make it money. So why start heading down that road?