Now that Sony have gone and confirmed many of the rumours about the PS4 and its peripherals it got me to thinking.
It
looks like the platform is basically going to be a PC. The design will
be closed of course, but not for long. It'll only be a matter of time
before the system is reverse-engineered and I believe it will be
possible to create a WINE-style API emulation layer which will make the
software playable on PCs (probably within some kind of virtualised
environment so that GPU-level code can be translated).
It
doesn't matter what the specs of the PS4 are now; Relative to a high-end, gaming PC they'll be nearly out of date by the time it finally
ships. What this says to me is that Sony are going focus on multiplayer
titles so that game license verification will be a mandatory part of the
start-up process. In order words, they're going to move away from a proprietary hardware platform to a proprietary software one. Personally, I don't have a great opinion of their software efforts, although their user-facing efforts have been a bit more polished since the PS3's launch.
It seems inevitable that titles will be ripped and
made downloadable by various parties on the Internet to be installed and
played in single-player mode, for those titles that support single-player. This may be Sony's way of forcing the majority of people over to multi-player DLC, with a percentage off micro-transactions being Sony's expected revenue stream for the following 5 years. It remains to be seen whether
someone will create a proxy server that can pretend to be Sony's network
and allow people to connect together on their own private networks.
Interesting times ahead for Sony and I'm not sure whether they'll be up to the challenge. If the PS4 isn't going to be available until (realistically) early 2014, it certainly gives Microsoft plenty of advance notice of what they need to do to compete.
