First thing I thought was “bye Cell” and immediately had 2 minutes of silence for all the guys who fucking died on this stupidly complex architecture. For nothing because now the PS4 sports a X86 architecture like hundreds of millions of PCs. That’s right no PS3 games (including PSN games, apparently) can run on the PS4, it will happen through streaming. Sounds like a lot of problems ahead.
I can’t help but draw a comparison with the arcade era and its massive custom chips, expensive machines designed around games in its heydays. But then the business side took over, 16 bits consoles brought an “unfair” advantage and these crazy machines needed to be profitable: arcade cabinets became Pentium powered PCs. Same running code everywhere, easy to upgrade. Today touch devices and $1 games brought “unfair” competition to the ridiculously complex and “innovative” PS3. Sony had to solve that.
The moral of the story is that developers’ support is much more important than engineering beauty. People, first. Business, first.
That’s what I keep being amazed at, how business doesn’t seem to matter to developers when they hear about a new platform. It should! Dev kits to rent? Check. Certification to pass? Check. Price, availability, prototype non disclosed? Check. And the thing is a PC.
I am supposed to get excited? Which developer is excited, the ones on Sony payroll? Sure it makes sense, good for them but for the rest of us I think it looks pretty damn bad.