Sony Playstation 4 Announced: Everything You Need to Know!

It was February 20th, 2013 and everyone got dressed up and hot to trot for the latest Sony event called ‘See The Future’ that was held in New York city where the all new PlayStation 4 would be unveiled. Well just to clarify that never happened as the system was never unveiled and only a new controller was to be seen to the utter disappointment to all, myself included, as this was not what I had anticipated for this day. What we did get however, was a lot of good marketing talk and the promise of a new system by the end of 2013 along with some other useful and promising technology features that we will talk about today.

Onstage at the event Sony’s Andrew House began with the opening statement “PlayStation is the best place to play’’ followed by the revealing of specs and features that the new unit will have. Mark Cerny had this to say about the new technology, the new PS4 is based off a ‘’Supercharged PC Architecture with an X86 Processor, enhanced PC-Style GPU and 8GB of high-speed GDDR memory. The PS4 contains 8 CPU cores, providing almost 2 teraflops of computational performance. The power allows for 30,000 polygons to be rendered in real time (by way of comparison, Heavy Rain on the PS3 utilized 15,000). “Overall, our goal has been to architect the system to support a breadth of experiences,” said Cerny.

The controller which has been dubbed Dual Shock 4, features the Vita-style touchpad you may have heard about and has a light bar on the back to identify each player. There will also be a 3D camera on the controller that will help keep track of players using the bar, which in itself is a very interesting idea. Sony wants to change the way we interact online and our online experience. Starting off by allowing you to play your digitally purchased title before it’s done downloading and allow users to capture video as they are playing allowing them to share their real time gaming experience as they are playing as well as the feature to take a screenshot and instantly share it online. The Social focus also will include Live chat as well being able to watch games being played by others with a ‘’Reach Out’’ feature giving players the options of joining others games or sharing video. Sony has said their goal is to make video sharing like screenshots are shared today, which would be a rather interesting aspect of the PS4.

Thus far, Facebook and Ustream were both bragged as 3rd party services the PS4 was designed to work with in the new Social world of Sony. Gaikai is an acquisition of Sony that is already starting to show positive growth for the new PlayStation console. Dave Perry co-founder of Gaikai and their CEO made a stage appearance talking about the things his company was doing, things like instant notifications when your friends buy a new game, or allowing you to play a part of game before its time and try it for free and then if you like it buy it.  Although not many exact examples were shown, they did show users will have the ability to broadcast themselves by just clicking the new ‘’Share’’ button on the new DualShaock-4 as video trimming is built into the PS4 interface. There will also be a feature that is called Director Status available to developers that will allow an individual to alter the gaming environment of the player using the console.

What gamers will not like is the fact that the PS4 will not be backwards compatible and none of your previous PS2 titles will be able to be played on it, as only the newer titles will be able to be played. Sony did state however, that they are working however to try and get the PS4 to play as many titles as possible. A round of game demos that included the confirmation that the Bungie’s Destiny will be coming to the PS4 finalized the event and the demos did look very nice and competitive with today’s mid level PC. As far as pricing and availability Sony was pretty tight lipped about that and have left them room to maneuver in case of any unforeseen problems or hiccups they may encounter. Microsoft still has yet to announce their final unit and since Sony did not reveal any actual hardware they could make changes depending on what Microsoft has up their sleeve. Hopefully at E3 we will hear some more on the new PS4, but for now all we can do is wait and see what really happens as Sony is waiting for the holidays to tout their new device.  So that is it, are you surprised by this move from Sony and are you still anticipating the PlayStation 4 after hearing what Sony had to say? Thanks for reading and I always want to hear what you have to say as your opinion matters on Tech OF Tomorrow.