RolStoppable said:
You don't seem to understand that it's not in Sony's best interest to keep making dedicated hardware. The PlayStation consoles themselves are the biggest reason for the lack of or low profitability in gaming, so it shouldn't be surprising that Sony will move in a direction where they have to no longer take a loss on hardware. |
The cloud still has those costs of hardware though, because Servers cost money.
Servers to support the next generation will have to provide the processing power for the millions of people or even dozens to hundreds of millions of people that will want to play on them.
Take this generation's technology, a PS4 APU costs around $100 and the GDDR5 could be $70 (random figures, but fair for launch prices), that's $170 for one user, then multiply that by say 3 million people on launch day $510,000,000, that's just the 3 million APUs and 24 million GBs of GDDR5 needed for those gamers, you also have to factor in motherboards, PSUs, HDDs and any other tech for all of those servers, you're probably looking at closer to a billion dollars for your launch server farms and then comes the issues of all of the bandwidth costs and then the issue of how how a suscription based model will work for a complete gaming solution like this.
At least with physical hardware you don't have to worry about the pure strain of a huge cloud based network on the broadband infrastructure.
You still have to make money on hardware either way, the fact that people don't see the tech or they're losing control of their system means the cloud will likely fail if it's the only option people have.
The next generation of processing technology will add even more demand to costs or just the strain on the network, because more bandwidth will be needed.
Going all cloud makes no sense, having the cloud as a part of the gaming infrastructure makes more sense, because it gives people options and a physical console also adds in reliability that most people will always be able to use most of their content unless the power goes offline at home.
A way around controlling used games better would be to go all digital based and sell every user a system with a decent sized HDD from day one or make it easy for them to put as big a HDD as they want in the system or just make sure they can plug in an external drive easily.
An initial loss is fine, because usually it's small per unit of hardware sold, the company knows most of the costs for that are covered from day one, hell PS4 basically broak even from day one, with one game sold, with a server network you have to spread it's costs across the year, not knowing if many people will default on payments, you still probably have to sell a box anyway, unless you're going to tap into existing PS4 owners, who now have to pay a subscription every month, to just play some better looking games on their existing PS4 or whatever platform Sony decides to allow access to Playstation Cloud.
If Sony goes with a PS+ type 1 payment per year type thing, then the costs of paying for the server hardware will take years to recoup, remember it's going to cost at least a billion dollars for the gamers on release date of the platform.
The cloud being the only thing gamers have access to for next gen is very unrealistic, if it's a partial thing, as a supplement to physical hardware, then the investment is much less than the costs of going all out.
You basically guarantee with physical hardware that it will be paid for on launch day, but the cloud can't really work like that, because people aren't going to all together pay out $1B on launch day for something they can't physically lay their hands on.
I know I wouldn't pay £349 to just connect to Playstation Cloud, even a £90 a year service would seem like too much, but a new console just makes sense too me.
