Sony has made their appearance this week in London to show off their PS4, where their retail partners and media correspondents were able to play the upcoming games, seeing the potential of the next-gen console which should be available in about 4 months.
Sony Computer Entertainment’s Managing Director of UK and Ireland Fergal Gara was at the special event answering many of the interesting questions that has been buzzing around.
Many have wondered if Sony purposely removed the PS4 camera, in order to gain a price advantage over the Xbox One. The Sony managing director informs us that the price was decided way before the unveiling of the Xbox One price.
Gara states, “It can’t be true because we couldn’t possibly have known what the Xbox was going to cost. What I’ll say is, lots of ideas were considered you know, lots of different combinations and of course price was I think fairly clear from a very long time out but you know everything about PS4 is about giving gamers choice.
“So if you don’t want a camera you don’t have to have a camera. If you want to trade in games, you can trade in games. So there’s been nothing in the whole proposition that is overly restrictive and I think the reaction has proved that people value that.”
The PS4’s main purpose is to be the next best console, more powerful than ever before, a wider variety of games, and it should be exactly what the gamers want.
Gara focuses on the PS4’s goal by saying, “The thing I’m most pleased about is the entire design principles about the PS4 are being focused around the gamer first. So how can we create a platform that’s great to develop for and easy to develop for, because that unleashes the creatives and if they can create the best experiences that’s going to lead to satisfaction for gamers.
“But secondly to design a piece of technology like that it’s very easy to deliver one or the other, in particular I’m talking about the price and the performance trade off. It’s very hard to deliver both and for me the balance that’s been delivered across those two is outstanding.
“So it’s great to be going to market with what we believe is the most powerful gaming device ever conceived and certainly ever developed and at a price that feels very acceptable, certainly based on the pre-order volumes that we’re seeing.”
The Sony employee even emphasizes on the PS4’s specifications of the 8GB GDDR5 memory, which will be more advanced and faster than the Xbox One.
“We have the most uncompromised memory spec that we could pretty well dream up and if you talk to developers, if you talk to first party, third party developers, you’ll see that that opens up the possibilities for them and it’s about as high spec as they could have ever imagined, 8GB gives them huge headroom to continue developing fantastic games.”
Gara has also gave his input on Microsoft’s flip flop decisions on their Xbox One’s DRM policies, used games, and constant online log-ins.
“Look here’s a phrase for you that someone I worked for once gave me which is, ‘if you do things first you do it for your customer, if you do it second you do it for yourself’. What I’m most pleased with is that we’ve had an agenda for a long time now and all we’ve done is stick to our agenda.
“So it is tremendously rewarding that your agenda appeals to the people we most want to appeal to and that we don’t have to change, we just keep focused, we keep going the way we were going for many many months and years now, certainly as we’ve clarified details we’ve changed not a thing.”
Since the PS4 will not require the camera to be plugged in 24/7, it makes complete sense why it would not be available in each bundle, making the $399 price a great selling point. People have been wondering if there will be a PS4 camera bundle or better yet, maybe even a PS4 including a PS Vita bundle as well. Gara did not confirm of any bundles, but he did inform us that they will definitely be available.
“We’re talking to retail about bundles but of course we don’t need to formally create bundles so they’re in the one box necessarily, the way UK retail is it’s quite flexible really so we can create soft bundles as we call them.
“But it’s great to see that the retailers are hungry for these kind of conversations, they’re seeing the potential. They want to talk to us and the PS4 and Vita devices put together is not a huge amount more than the PlayStation 3 was when we launched that.”
Gara comments on how amazing the PS4 pre-orders are doing by saying, “Based on feedback yes [we are ahead on pre-orders]. But what we say as a team is that we’ve had a good few weeks but we’re in for the long game. So let’s be satisfied but let’s keep our heads down, keep focused and realize that it’s a long game so success is not realized way before launch. It’s a good start but there’s much much much more to go.”
He ends the interview by pledging, “I think the last 20 years shows that we’re in it for the long haul! There’s more to be revealed around services and what else is going to come with the package you know, when it launches and what more can people expect so we’ll go into more detail about that probably around about Gamescom time so we won’t go into that today but take it from me, we designed the machine for the long haul.”
If Sony were to make a PS4 + PS Vita bundle, it would be a major selling point for me. What do you fans thought was interesting about this article and what do you expect from the PS4?