Why PS4 won't be cutting edge, and neither will Xbox3 - or Why Nintendo might win next gen

[DanneSandin]

Degausser said:
The big reason the PS3 cost so much was due to the diodes / laser thingies in the Blu-Ray player. They were forced into launching the system a year or two before they wanted to and thus had to make the price so high, and take a huge hit on the sales, to get Blu-Ray through. There shouldn't be any new format with stupidly expensive hardware in it to drive the price up like that, so the comparison is invalid imo.

However, we won't see a jump thats like compairing SD games on the Wii to HD games of PS3 / 360. However, if you've seen games like BF3 or Skyrim on PC high settings, you'll realise there is still a big gap more then capable of opening up when the consoles launch - how much it impacts on Wii's 3rd party support I don't know. I would imagine for the first few years PS3 and 360 will continue to get a lot of the games made for them anyway.

Besides, Microsoft have no idea what Sony are doing and will be developing their new console completely seperate to Sony - and they will make a powerhouse and sell it at a loss if they so desire whether or not Sony do. They can't change the thing after Sony announce the PS4 as they'll have already spent hundreds of millions on the R&D up to this point.

To me it's fairly obvious the PS4 and Xbox 3 will be a big graphical leap over the Wii U (Within what is technologically feasible with todays hardware) - it's the only reason the consoles still arn't announced and they're happy to wait it out a year or more with the Wii U on the market. Cause they need the extra time to make the 'gap' large and affordable.

Let's assume PS4 will cost 40k yen in japan - that roughly translate to $460. They could sell it at $399, taking a loss of 60 bucks. But they can't have a console costing more than that. Period. They can't afford taking bigger hits imo. Now, I don't know how much power a $460 console packs, but surely it can't be leaps over the WiiU?