PS5 Coming at the End of 2020 According to Analyst: High-Spec Hardware for Under $500

[DonFerrari]

Intrinsic said:

Nate4Drake said:

  So let's talk about developing games on several SKUs, two from MS and one from Sony.   This is not helping at all, and the complexity of scalability will increase if you wanna try to push every single SKU. The reality is, most 3rd party developers will never waste much resources and money to do it, and the main differences will be in resolutions/frame-rate, draw distance and effects; the weakest SKU will hold down all the others.      1st party developers, on the other hand, can do more, but having one SKU with a GPU 3X more powerful, together with a faster CPU and RAM compared to the other, they must develop anyway with the lowest common denominator in mind, and have to give gamers the same core experience; this is a limiting factor.   Sony, on the other hand(if it's true they will release only one SKU), can make its exclusive games shining, taking full advantage of all the resources available in the way they want, without bothering about the weakest and less capable hardware.

 So, what consumers(those not loyal and tied to any Company) will choose on Day One ?  A very cheap SKU from MS, but massively underpowered considering it is a Next Gen System, and compared to PS5, which will have probably a very competitive price ?    Or Anaconda, very expensive and more powerful than PS5 ?  Or PS5, great hardware at a competitive price ?     It depends.  I'm not sure which is the best strategy.

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I think you are exagerating some things and understating others.

Firstly scalability is not a problem its a solution. A solution necessitated by the vastly different spec differences in the PC market. The nly way a dev can make a game that works on one hardware spec and doesn't totally just crash on others is via scalability. Its been in the PC industry for over a decade and believe it or not it made its way into consoles last gen. Its not complicating thins any more than they already have been. This is now all just normal.

As for what consumers will do? This one is even simpler. Consumers will do everything. There is a market fr people willing to spend $500 for the most powerful consle in the world. Then there is one for those that feel $400 gets them something thats good enough. And there are those that dont care abut 4K and have only $300 to spend. To all of them they are ding exactly what they want. Buoyed by every supporting reason in between.

Oneeee-Chan!!! said:
why do people think that PS5 will be only 1 SKU ?

Thats the million dollar question right there.

Circa 2005/2006 multiple skus would have meant different HDD sizes.

2020? It could very well mean 1080p and 4k. But somehow this is not something that sits well with a lot of people.

I guess you didn't understand what was being pointed as the problem of scalability.

It is that it isn't a magical thing that solves all. Also you hardly would make the game for the strongest platform and scale down (and get whatever result, even if poor) on the weaker system. You more likely make the game work as intended on the base then scale up to the stronger, thus we say the base system hold others down.

If scalability was magic, infinite or made to work from strongest to weakest instead of the opposite, the porting of AAA games to Switch would have been much easier task and a game like RDR2 wouldn't skip it even having 2 years to be ported over.

There is a point where you can't cut down efficiently so you have to ax the game and start to lose out and usually not a desirable thing. Also it takes more and more time when the gap among them is more significant.