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DM235 on 01 April 2016
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kitler53 said:
DM235 said:

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.

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.

I get what you are saying.  If Sony builds a robust OS, and handles all of the drivers in the background to handle all of the different hardware revisions (which I am assuming Apple does with iOS), developers can target any particular revision, and then do some regression testing to confirm it still works with the other hardware revisions.

If this happens, would there ever be a PS5?  Personally, I think I would miss that "wow" you get from a totally new generation of hardware if they just decide to do incremental changes for 10 years (and I guess the "wow" would still be there if you compare revision 5 to revision 1, but i think it would be somewhat hidden if you compare revision 5 to revision 4, for example).