Sony Lays Out The Future Of Playstation
We used to buy movies on discs when we wanted to watch them, and now huge numbers of people stream them off the internet instead. It’s not hard to picture something similar happening with games, even if the logical endpoint would be the elimination of all local gaming hardware.
I really hoped for that future to be now. I envisioned the current crop of consoles to be small boxes connected wirelessly to the console makers proprietary controller. Obviously, we’re not there for various reasons: Technical limitations at the server side and the consumer side, along with the massive industry built around the sale of used video games.
One thing about the current console situation is true: Sony is totally killing it.
Sony and the Playstation 4 have a fairly firm grasp on the present. While the next holiday season could yet bring about change in this still-young war between the Xbox One and the PS4, it’s difficult to imagine that the currently dominant PS4 will be sitting anything less than pretty come 2015. It got there by recognizing that the console industry in 2014 doesn’t look all that different than it did in 2012: despite a larger focus on smaller titles and downloadable content, people are still mostly interested in big games, a decently powerful box that will play them, and not a whole lot else on top. And thus we have the PS4.
It’s an extraordinary machine.