| KBG29 said: The days of PlayStation being a single hardware platform for 5 - 7 years at a time are done. There are to many competitors to stand still in the market now, and because of that competition we will never see software optimized like we did during the PS2 and before era. PlayStation has to evolve to survive. By utilizing the chipset of the PS4 across a wide range of devices they massivly expand their market while keeping the simiplist development enviorment possible. This is absolutly vital as they have to offer a way to locally access your games from as many devices as possible, to maintane a parity in value with the competition. If you can't see that every Sony TV, Blu-ray Player, Smart Phone, Tablet, Handheld, and Console should be running on One company wide OS and Hardware platform, then I am not sure what to tell you. This has been the idea behind PlayStation from the onset. Ken Kutaragi wanted to use PlayStation tech and software in all Sony devices. PS3 was his crown jewl, and Cell and XMB where supposed to unifiy Sony, but when PS3 was botched, the company parted ways with him, and it set Sony back nearly a decade. Now we are back at ground zero, and Sir Howard Stringer, and Kaz Hirai have finally got the company back to a point of unification. The PS4 tech and the PlayStation Network are the foundation for the unity and growth of the entire company. As for the PlayStation Phone and Tablet, they would run on the same chipset found in the PS4, and they would run on a modified version of the PS4 OS. They would run all PS4 games, as they would be identical to PS4. A tablet/Laptop will be more than possible on 10nm tech next year, and a Handheld/Phone will be possible on 7nm tech in the next two years. If they want to speed things up for a handheld and phone they can cut out a few GPU cores, lower the clock speed, run games at 540p, and checkerboard up res them to 1080p. All PlayStation games going forward are going to be built on scalable engines. As Sony releases more PS4 hardware with more or less GPU cores, different clock speeds, and more RAM, developers will be required to make games run across the entire PlayStation ecosystem. Thanks to the unity across devices, developing games across all PlayStation hardware will be extreamly easy, and add very little development to games, with some instances not requiring any additional work. |
The point is they dont have to do all that to be (more) successful.
They have playstation. make home console hardware that's connected to TVs. Release games for said hardware. Profit. Make iterations on existing hardware every 3-4 years and maintain forward and backward compatibility. Which extends home console user base and prevents you from ever starting from zero again. The beauty of that is that it flips the whole console model on its head. You no longer make new hardware worrying about building an install base as soon as possible. Instead you look at you insatll base every 3-4yrs and see how much h of it is still on your oldest running hardware which tells you where to focus on optimization.
The have remote play, rather than try and release new hardware in every sector, tablet, phone, PC....etc instead they should focus on getting remote play right. This ensures that with the one console they expect everyone to buy, those people can use remote play to play on their tablets, phones...etc.
The have Playstation Vue and PlayStation now, these two apps can be on every device platform you can think of. And PSvue is alresdy showing that's the direction they are going with. Thus you don't even have to have a PlayStation console to be tied into the Playstation ecosystem.
The already have the foundations of a great and profitable business model and by simply fine tuning it they stand to make signifivantly more and become stronger. Simply no reason to invest heavily in so many different hardwsrr types and even take on already established operating systems when they can just piggy back on what's already there.
Again, stop thinking as PlayStation as a hardware business. The hardware is just the trojan horse. The brand is more about software and services than anything else.
