DM235 said:
kitler53 said:
no one is asking you to upgrade every 2 years.
both the ps4 and the ps4k will play the same games. the ps4k will probably play games at that only run at 30fps on ps4 at 60fps. some people care a lot about that and will upgrade. some people won't give a shit and won't upgrade. because games will be forward/backward compatible you can litterally wait as long as you want to upgrade. older hardware versions will run a bit worse than newer hardware versions. as a consumer you can decide what kind of performance you want. if you are real graphics whore you can upgrade ever 2 years. if you don't care that a game runs at 30fps and maybe 900p instead of 1080p than you can probably wait 12 years. there will always be a higher end model to buy (~$400) but there will always be a lower end model to buy too (~$200 or $300) if you can't afford to spend a lot of money. your library lasts "forever" instead of being abandon each generation.
developers can and will optimize for each hardware. they already do it on pc and that enviornment is far more complex because instead of having 2-4 hardware versions to target there are literally thousands of variants to consider on pc. it won't be "free" for them to do this kind of development but i think developers will prefer this kind of problem to the alternative problem of starting a project 3-4 years prior to knowing what the specs of the machine the game will run on will actually be. business love predictability. it helps them plan which is crucial when starting a project that lasts several years.
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If the hardware changes every 2 years, then it will be very unpredictable, impossible to plan, and businesses will hate it. Based on what you said above, the hardware could change twice during a single 3-4 year project. Are you sure developers would prefer this to a fixed, 5-year console cycle?
And if there are 2 models to buy, and each one has different SKUs for various hard drive sizes, and various SKUs for game bundles, you will also annoy retailers, who barely have enough shelf space / storage space, or knowledgable staff, to deal with all of this.
Maybe I am old fashioned, but I think they should just stick to hard drive upgrades, game bundles and slim models.
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being forward/backwards compatible in part means targeting the the old version first and then optimizing forward. that's how iphone developers work at least. no one targets the latest and greatest they target the version 2 versions back. new development will basically target the latest version of the hardware when the project starts or 1 hardware revision back (depending on MSony's release schedule and the development's expected development length) and then when the project completes they'll optimize a bit for any newer hardware versions.
i don't believe anyone will make development targeted for the ps4k for quite a while,.. like 3-6 years. they will develop for the ps4 and do a bit of optimization for the ps4k when it happens. a game that released in 2015 will never be optimized to take advantage of any of the newer hardware revisions but a game that released in 2015 will always work on any of the newer hardware revisions.
i think we'll see less skus dedicated to harddrive size like we did last gen. if the harddrive size is changed it will piggyback on to the interal hardware revisions. harddrives are upgradable anyways so there isn't really a need to have too many sizes and being that this gen installs are manditory there is no reason to have a tiny (4Gb) drive like last gen supported.
