Sony Reportedly Cut PS4 Camera to Beat Xbox One Price
Sony dropped a bomb shell when it revealed at E3 this year during its press conference that the PlayStation 4 was going to be $399, $100 cheaper than its competitor the Xbox One.
According to sources close to IGN, the reason that Sony was able to drop the price of its next gen console to be cheaper than the Xbox One was because it cut the PlayStation 4 camera at the last minute.
Because the PlayStation 4 camera was cut well into the console's development, this meant that some functions built into the PlayStation 4 controller have been rendered useless. The DualShock 4 controller was built with LED Move trackers. Now these LED's sole functions are to serve as visual cues for the player on in-game occurrences, such as when the player is low on health.
The PlayStation 4 camera has now been made into a $60 accessory.
Though Sony is essentially giving up support of the PS Move by doing so (unless it releases some killer games that support the camera), it may have been the right call on their part. Motion control, at least for this generation, has proven to be a dud for gaming. Sony's proven that its focus right now is on core gamers, who probably don't find motion control to be an integral part of their gaming experience. And this attitude is paying off; not only did Sony win the favor of gamers at E3 2013, but the PS4 is doing rather well in pre-sales.
Now why they bundle the camera with the unit when they know it would just increase the costs, time and resources into development?
1) Motion controls are rarely used in my experience. It's usually just an "oh that's cool", used a few times then sits there unused. That's my experience with the Wii, Move and Kinect.
2) Cheaper means more will buy it (many "casual" people will see the prices and pick the PS4 over X1 because of it).
3) The people who you can rely on to buy your console are the more game orientated market, they more than likely won't buy many, if any, motion related games.
4) They could phase out the motion controls later on in life if nobody is buying it. It'll be easier than, say, releasing a "slim" version of the console to strip it of it.
5) If they did include then didn't add it, there may be consumer backlash if the price isn't cut enough.
6) If it was included, they may have warped ideas of its use. That might've lead to wasted money on motion control games. This way it's easier to see, easier to put money where it's needed.
You do realise that the Xbox One will or can use a new form of Tile Rendering which lowers the memory need and ups the detail available by a huge factor? It's going to be available with the One and with most GPUs going forward with Windows 8.1. It's part of the DX11.2 spec.
Possibly why MS decided to go with a lower powered GPU/RAM solution as sheer brute force rendering won't be required. Instead of needing 2GB to render an image you only need a fraction of it and get more detail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EswYdzsHKMc
Intrigued as to why folks are keeping quiet on this little nugget.
I'm pretty skeptic that a new software architecture would be able to overcome the memory bandwidth issue, specially for graphics. How are you supposed to load huge textures fast enough? Where are these textures going to be stored in order to avoid R/W to memory? The ESRAM is too small and still slower than GDDR5, so I'm pretty skeptic on this one. I would love to be proven wrong on this, but I can't find grounds to hope for it.
And then there is the fact that the PS4 reportedly has an 18-Block GPU against a 12-Block on the Xbox.
Sony's camera costs 59$ and that's with a nice margin.
So even with camera it's 40$ cheaper than Xbone 180.
Besides, Sony's controllers come with a headset.
Well back around the turn of the century we had PowerVR based Kyro cards that had half the sheer power of the current Nvidia Geforce 2 cards of the time but with tile rendering they could push equal frame rates with the same image quality. Sometimes better.
Will be interesting to see.
You mean allow people to use their games anywhere by simply logging in to their XBL account. Or that they put the control of used game limiting ON THE DEVELOPER!. It was not MS saying you could not share games or sell your games when you were done they were giving the devs the control to do so if they wished, which obviously not all would have done.
This was likely at the reques of companies such as EA that have seen massive success by including very restrictive DRM schemes in their software. Despite how much the consumer hates the types of DRM used in diablo3 and Sim City and how they impacted them shortly after launch they allowed the devs to recoup a huge amount of cash due to limited piracy. If you doubt this then check how many units they sold above other games in their genre.
MS is getting ahuge amount of hate from all corners of the press and it is really forcing this skewed view on people that MS is somehow the worst company ever. Are they the best thing since sliced bread? No. Are they just like every other company out there? Ya dang sure they are.
People are saying MS is the worst for daring to try something different and then go and throw their hat in the Sony arena yet they forget that Sony pulled launch features on their PS3, tried to sue people that were trying to replace this same feature set, installed rootkits on fricking audio CDs and were so incompetent with their security they were storing credit card info on their easily hackable servers.
I am as saddened by the lack of power in the XB1 as most and some of MS' decisions recently but when people try to suggest that Sony is a much better consumer focused company than MS is all they are doing is showing how quick they are to forget the actual damage that Sony has caused to many consumers.
No, I'm talking about reality, not about FUD that you have posted.
Where all M$ "sharing" was about was not much more than a game trial. (which already exists on current platforms) Insane that even that garbage was limited to 1 hour and 10 people.
All the choice that devs would have with Microsoft was a choice between being simply restrictive or insanely restrictive. There was simply no option to "as with 360". Devs are already in control about how to deal with second hand games AS FAR AS ONLINE GOES.
And that on top of region locks.
And now we get more FUD about how it would cost Sony 100$ to add an accessory that is supposed to be selling at 59$.
This generation looks much the same. Seems that we are finally getting games that look like they were from a PC, but with better textures (something that will easily come to the PC). So again I think I will enjoy my PC games for the bulk of the generation, and towards the end of the cycle I will buy both of them to play the few exclusives that perk my interests.
Hardware wise both consoles are going to be similar in useful power. Both are going to have major DRM issues requiring internet connections per game title even if the console does not overtly require it. Both now have yearly subscription fees for multiplayer games and will have less and less single player titles. And most people (at least in the US) will be purchasing at least one of each console by the end of the generation. Everything else is just minutia to stir people up about nothing.
As for the slower memory in Xbone, it's true it has much slower bandwidth for the GPU but it has much better latency for the CPU. We'll see where the bottlenecks are. It's quiet possible the EDRAM will be used for prefetch which could make the memory subsystem perform similiar to GDDR5 (poor latency great bandwidth) when needed for graphics, but CPU can access the DDR3 (great latency poor bandwidth).
Mafisomental, your point that X360 suffered at end of market simply is not true. As far as I can tell the PS3 did not surpass the 360 later in life as you point out. Most of the evidence shows cross platform titles perform better on 360 to this day. Truly if anything, the difference between both is minimal. Are you a developer? Everything I've heard is that the MS APIs are easy to develop for, which leads to better performance. Developers can choose to develop closer to metal if they choose, it's never been forced on them to use DirectX. There's been very few PS3 games that show the strength of the hardware, just a couple first party titles.
The more robust the API the better it is for developers. You're the first person I've ever seen claim that Microsoft's API is a hindrance compared to Sony's.
XBone not only has slower RAM, but also weaker GPU.
You can't compensate it with eSRAM.
You accuse me of FUD when everything I stated i backed up by official sources and then use a (false) rumour t try and discredit what I wrote. Yes it is limited to 10 people but I personally think that is fair enough otherwise you could share with everyone, but then that is as a developer of a highly "shared" software.
The other limitations you mention of it being time limited is false, read below from the horses mouth:
http://o.canada.com/2013/06/26/xbox-one-this-is-how-microsoft-should-have-approached-drm/
Just because you don't understand the reasoning behind things or are unwilling to educate yourself on something that you have made your mind up on doesn't mean you should be calling other people out for posting facts.
Your opinion is fine and dandy but it is not fact, do not confuse the two. The FACT that your opinionis based on false rumours makes your opinion mean very little to myself.
Please stop. M$ officially spread FUD making vague statement after vague statement. Here is what this "sharing" was about:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=598291
If you didn't get it, let me explain it to you: essentially you were getting time limited trial of the game. Something that you can get for free already, without anyone "sharing" it with you. And the only freaking "advantage" that "shared" version had over normal demos, was that you could keep "saves". Guess what, it already works like that on PSN.
Microsoft was trying to take away your rights, without giving you ANYTHING in return. Not even a small discount on games that you can't resell anymore.
Reasoning is obvious, MOAR MONEAY for company that lives in a bubble that users had to burst after E3.