Shiken said:
Pretty much this.
It was stated that the PS4 was actually launched at a profit, and as tech got stronger and Sony not lowering the price for quite a while, those profits increased. The X1 was also priced to sell at a profit, but they had to cut the price due to lagging behind in sales.
The architecture for these consoles is very simple and cheap to make when compared to previous gen installments. The PS4.5 will be underpowered for its time just as the PS4 was claimed to be (I am not going all PC elitist here, that is another topic) in the eyes of the public because they will once again price it where they make a profit, but build it not to be insanely expensive.
It is the start of a very bad console cycle for the consumer if this becomes the norm, and I refuse to support it. |
At the same time, the console vs PC power argument is similar to comparing apples with oranges. The consoles are not only designed for absolute optimization but the parts are designed around each other. We still don't see PC games utilizing GPGPU compute, GDDR5 ram with a unified pool of memory (the gpu and CPU draws from the same pool where as on PC, the graphics cards have their own VRAM to cope with), and ronly relatively recently are PC games starting to rely on parallel processing. Beyond that, console platforms have first parties that they will pump much more money into than 99% of PC devs have. The result is a console with a laptop CPU running games like ratchet and clank, the order, uncharted etc.
I believe the cofounder of iD Software once famously said that console development nets twice as much a hardware advantage as its PC counterpart. John McCormick. Dudes a wizard and now leads Occulus Rift.
