Dusk said:
It makes no difference what the PS4 APU costs, nor the DDR 5 specifically. You are thinking about this far too one dimensionally. They will not need exact PS4 replicas to run the games from the servers. After reading all of what you wrote, again you are thinking too linear with almost all of this. A console not only looses money per console sold, but it also looses money, and a whole shit ton of money, to R&D among the costs of production, distribution and marketing. The reason that PSNow is viable right now is because it's upgradable over time and it has a growing support infrastructure, but it's still in its infancy. So there is not direct initial cost like you seem to be thinking there is, at least not the way you are painting the picure of it. I'm also not saying all of this will take place tomorrow, but it could be very viable in the not so distant future. Think about how much has changed in the last 5 years. Now decade. So how much farther will we be in 5 years? If the profit margin from PSNow trumps the profit margin from the consoles, it will likely mean no more consoles, OR a very cost effective (for the manufacturer) console that will ACTUALLY be profitable from day one, or at least directly paying out of the hold dug to research and develop the thing. |
You clearly didn't read my post thoroughly enough, I mentioned the subsciption factor, it's needed to pay for everything to do with the hardware and maybe the games.
My thoughts weren't one dimentional at all, they relate the only point that matters for a business, which effects every decision (hence why it's multi-dimentional thing), that is how do I make money.
Too high a price for the customer, the more likely you lose customers and that means you lose overall income. The only reason to do a cloud only system is if it was more cost effective, but it's not!
With physical hardware people know what the deal is, they buy the box, connect it at home and get their next gen console experience (compared to the last), with the cloud they have to pay out the same amount of cash (in one way or another), they get a lag filled experience, no new physical box, a worse experience because of said lag and the new box experience is lost, they also have to now pay a monthly fee comparable to the price of their mobile phone bill, for the rest of the generation, along with buying games, with no physical ownership.
The reason PS Now is viable is because it's made for PS3 level gaming, it's not aiming to provide the current, let alone next gen experience. PS3's Cell & RSX, along with RAM is very cheap compared to PS4 or whatever PS5 will have.
A gradual upgrade doesn't work for the fully fledged implementation of the next gen platform. PS Now isn't providing PS3 gaming for all the people that want to play PS3 games, it's only being used by a few PS Now customers and isn't aiming to replace everything.
The math is quite simple really, for each user you need a processor, RAM and everything you needed for each console, plus bandwidth to connect to that person, the subscription model doesn't recoup all of the costs until at the least a year down the line from launch, which means Sony or whoever has incurred that cost for all of that time, with the physical hardware they've been paid for all of those consoles on launch day and now they're making money off of the software months before they'll make a dent in their debt from the cloud only system.
Another factor to think about is that people fear what they don't understand, most people won't get how this works, because it's way too complicated for the lay person.
The profit margin for PS Now doesn't relate to the profit margin for a next gen cloud based console, because Playstation Cloud uses far more expensive hardware from day one.
