There’s a 99% chance that the PS4 will be revealed today at the PlayStation Meeting at 11pm GMT.
Tons of rumors and quasi-confirmed facts have been coming out in the last few weeks, including a good look at the new iteration of the DualShock controller, now featuring a frontal touchscreen, a possible speaker/microphone, direct Move integration and a headphone jack, alongside improvements to the classic design.
The leaked spec sheets speak of a off-the-shelf components direction for its construction, which will make it easier and cheaper to produce than the custom hardware builds of the previous consoles. It will also be significantly easier for dev teams to make games for it, since it uses the familiar x86 CPU architecture that you can find on PC.
As for the software library and online services, there’s only been wild rumors, a lot of them pointing to locking physical game purchases to your account, effectively shutting down the second hand market, as well as a paid subscription similar to Xbox Live, although less aggressive. Oft-delayed games like The Last Guardian or Agent are now rumored to be possible launch games, alongside all the new game announcements that have only been vaguely confirmed to be for next-gen consoles.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m tentatively excited. Sony has always been more focused on games than Microsoft in the last few years, and they have a very strong group of first and second party developers that have always delivered great exclusive titles, so I’m quite sure they have a great lineup of games planned for it. As you should know, console wars are fought with games, not hardware, although that has changed quite a bit since Microsoft banalized multimedia online services on consoles, so that’s a new factor in the war.
What are your thoughts on all this?
And please, let’s keep this civil. No rabid fanboys allowed.
