It’s such a large decision, because it’s a commitment not just to the initial launch but for the life cycle. That has massive implications for how it will shape the business model for a number of years. Yes, we debated. But it became extremely clear to me that financial issues aside we had to be struggling for a certain level of experience that would get people to embrace a brand new platform.
If we were going to fulfill our promises as a company, but if the industry as a whole was going to move on… we were starting to get a lot of nay-saying, ‘what’s the role of a console? Is there a role for a console?’ Those two things came together to point out what was needed for the transformative experience.
Cerny extrapolated on House’s remarks, noting that certain games absolutely require a hard drive, specifically heavy-hitters like Watch Dogs.
For the hard drive, we thought does every player need downloadable content? Not every player does. But does every player need to play Watch Dogs the way it was intended? And you know, if you want to save money, unfortunately the answer is yes. Watch Dogs is a title that needed 15GB cached, very fast media on a hard drive or it wasn’t going to be able to be played at the level the creator’s wanted it to be. It was embedded on such a basic level.
This information makes the inclusion of a hard drive seem a lot more obvious, but even so; could it be a mere chicken-egg scenario? If PS4 or Xbox One had lacked hard drives, would Ubisoft have simply found an alernative to such a large required cache? Watch Dogs is coming to Wii U, remember, and though it will undoubtedly look less stellar due to differences in hardware specs, I highly doubt the lack of a hard drive will be the main culprit for that version’s lesser visual fidelity.
Related: Sony Reveals Why PS4 is Slanted
Cerny explained that the decision to include 8GB of RAM was similarly painstaking, with House noting that both it and the hard drive decision caused the two of them “sleepless nights.” As costs added up and Sony continuously chose what it felt was right for gamers in the long run, it eventually became clear that the PS camera was the weakest link.
It’s pretty obvious if you do the math, it’s more than a billion for the hard drive, and more than a billion for the extra RAM, so it was pretty obvious to me that something was going to have to give. But at the same time the camera makes sense as an independent proposition. It does not need to be included with the hardware to be a success. If it offers something that is perceived to be of value, then it’s a great thing to add to your PlayStation 4 ecosystem.
This, of course, allowed PS4 to be $100 cheaper than Xbox One at launch, a blunder Microsoft is still recovering from (despite the removal of Kinect as a mandatory inclusion). It’s not clear where the console wars will go from here, but Sony’s unprecedented head start can only be seen as an enormous early win. [Via: IGN]
