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[ItWasMeantToBe19]

^ According to Retro's job pages, they're hiring for a Wii game.

 

[DaSorcerer7]

-Xbox 360 before 2014? Highly unlikely,but not impossible

-PS4 before 2014? No chance


1)-It's been well known for a while that Sony and Microsoft are planning a 2014 release for the their next generation consoles.

GAMESTOP: Xbox 720 and PS4 not out until 2014 (July 2011)


2)-Wii U isn't going to pressure anyone

John Carmack:The Next Gen Of Consoles With Be 10 Times As Powerful (June 2011)


Michel Ancel: WiiU is not a next-gen system (June 2011)


Gearbox:Wii U is 'a stop-gap before real next-gen (July 2011)



3)-The Xbox 360 has been performing exceptionally well in the U.S. market


4)-The PS3 won't hit the mass market price point (€/$199) until 2012.The PS4 will be released when the PS3 is at €/$129


5)-Sucker Punch has already posted a job listing seeking a senior producer for its next PS3 game (June 2011)


6)-So far, everything is going according to Sony's plan.

Sony Shuhei's Yoshida: Watch our rivals go next-gen first (July 2010)

yeah, i guess they planned to lose billions on the ps3 as well.

 

[bj00rn_]

Since forever. People can keep telling themselves otherwise but its the truth.

Where did I say anything about sales. I didn't, that doesn't change the fact that Madden, CoD, Halo, GTA, Mario, and Zelda are all mainstream/casual games.

Not that it matters but that is certainly not a fact. "Mainstream" and "casual" are two different words and have different meanings (although they are related in parts of this context). One describes gaming demographics, the other describes game style.

I'm not implying that "mainstream" or "casual" is a negative, but f.ex. Halo never fitted under "casual" gaming simply because it mainly is a strategic sandbox FPS shooter (As opposed to Tetris or Angry Birds f.ex.), and it was neither a mainstream game (That demographics came later) on the Xbox because the Xbox's demographics infamously never catered for the mainstream, but the adult semi-hardcore (barf) crowd.

 

[patsu]

I'm not saying MS and Sony shouldn't invest in advanced technology, just that being as powerful as absolute highest end PC is irrelevant. I hope they include the best possible tech for $400 or whatever they're supposed to cost (possibly with the traditional subsidizing by manufacturer), but matching 300W monster GPUs might turn out impossible.

It will be based on their visual goals, heat envelope and price point. I don't think they need to match 300w GPUs, but the box needs to be versatile. I also think that specific visual features will be irrelevant since the nextgen GPU should be flexible enough to handle most issues. The workflow and system design may be more important.

 

[The Crimson Kid]

yeah, i guess they planned to lose billions on the ps3 as well.

They did!

All of Sony's platforms have been loss leaders. They lose money on the system at first but can eventually break even through licensing fees and manufacturing efficiencies.

They didn't want to lose as much as they did, but that was due to the insane amount of tech crammed into the original PS3.

Your snarkiness ignores the reality of the situation. Try thinking before you post. It'll help you out here.

 

[Melchiah]

I wonder what price point Sony will be targeting for their console? They were very outspoken that they were going to get to $249 for Vita. I guess it depends on where WiiU comes in, but is $399 considered reasonable, or will they try for $299 like PS and PS2?

PS2 was 500€ (2995FIM - about a half of average monthly salary of the time) over here in Finland, when it was launched in December 2000. I don't know how much PS1 cost at launch, as I bought it in 1998, but looking at the PS2 price, the PS3 price (599€) wasn't that surprising. In that context, the talk about next gen consoles needing to cost 299-399$ at maximum seems odd to me.

 

[mblitek]

my claim to fame is that my family used to own horses/ride horses at the same barn as Mark Rein. At the time I believe he was just starting on quake. I should probably get in touch with him again…

I think the thing that really makes console games so great is the reiteration of using the same hardware without having to worry about new technologies/hardware. So as a developer you're able to spend more time tweaking and optimizing code versus researching spending time trying to include all the new types of hardware i.e. the PC. However, the PC allows for the extremes in sound, graphics and I suppose multiplayer elements as well.

Anyways the speculation will be interesting as well as seeing what the new Wii is capable of.

 

[FoneBone]

They did!

All of Sony's platforms have been loss leaders. They lose money on the system at first but can eventually break even through licensing fees and manufacturing efficiencies.

They didn't want to lose as much as they did, but that was due to the insane amount of tech crammed into the original PS3.

Your snarkiness ignores the reality of the situation. Try thinking before you post. It'll help you out here.

This coming from someone who doesn't realize the difference between initially selling hardware at a loss, and never turning a profit at all

 

[jim-jam bongs]

They did!

All of Sony's platforms have been loss leaders. They lose money on the system at first but can eventually break even through licensing fees and manufacturing efficiencies.

They didn't want to lose as much as they did, but that was due to the insane amount of tech crammed into the original PS3.

Your snarkiness ignores the reality of the situation. Try thinking before you post. It'll help you out here.

Massively condescending considering the importance of the figures. They lost an amount equal to all the profit they made from the most successful console of all time, and don't appear to be getting any closer to breaking even. Try to think before you post.

my claim to fame is that my family used to own horses/ride horses at the same barn as Mark Rein. At the time I believe he was just starting on quake. I should probably get in touch with him again…

Be sure to tell him how much you enjoyed Quake, he'll appreciate that.

 

[DaSorcerer7]

They did!

All of Sony's platforms have been loss leaders. They lose money on the system at first but can eventually break even through licensing fees and manufacturing efficiencies.

They didn't want to lose as much as they did, but that was due to the insane amount of tech crammed into the original PS3.

Your snarkiness ignores the reality of the situation. Try thinking before you post. It'll help you out here.

No I think i've grasped the reality of the situation actually. In that, no company, plans to lose that much money, even if they are adopting a loss leading strategy, the ps3 has sold nowhere near the level of sony's previous consoles. That fact is well documented.

 

[StevieP]

2013 will give us a 22nm or possibly even a 18nm console. Compared to the 40nm card we currently have we could see a 4 to 5 times increase in rendering power . Ram would most likely hit 8 gigs and we would possibly see 8 core cpus in the console.

No. To all of it, no.

 

[[Nintex]]

Sony can just stick with blu-ray so even if the CPU and GPU jump are equal to the PS2>PS3 leap it wouldn't be as expensive because they won't have to launch a new format. I believe Kutaragi blamed most of the PS3 costs on the problems they had with blu-ray. He was even the one who proposed to go with a DVD PS3. Sony also isn't building another Cell CPU so whatever they pick for the next console(more raw CPU power will probably be the least important factor for these next-gen machines and most of the budget will go to the GPU) it'll be much cheaper than what they developed for the PS3.

 

[iamshadowlark]

No I think i've grasped the reality of the situation actually. In that, no company, plans to lose that much money, even if they are adopting a loss leading strategy, the ps3 has sold nowhere near the level of sony's previous consoles. That fact is well documented.

Wow. That's almost exactly what he just said.

 

[StevieP]

Where are Jokeropedia's charts when you need them.

 

[Zoramon089]

-Xbox 360 before 2014? Highly unlikely,but not impossible

-PS4 before 2014? No chance


1)-It's been well known for a while that Sony and Microsoft are planning a 2014 release for the their next generation consoles.

GAMESTOP: Xbox 720 and PS4 not out until 2014 (July 2011)


2)-Wii U isn't going to pressure anyone

John Carmack:The Next Gen Of Consoles With Be 10 Times As Powerful (June 2011)


Michel Ancel: WiiU is not a next-gen system (June 2011)


Gearbox:Wii U is 'a stop-gap before real next-gen (July 2011)



3)-The Xbox 360 has been performing exceptionally well in the U.S. market


4)-The PS3 won't hit the mass market price point (€/$199) until 2012.The PS4 will be released when the PS3 is at €/$129


5)-Sucker Punch has already posted a job listing seeking a senior producer for its next PS3 game (June 2011)


6)-So far, everything is going according to Sony's plan.

Sony Shuhei's Yoshida: Watch our rivals go next-gen first (July 2010)

An entire post based solely on speculation from various people and groups...
*claps*

 

[Orayn]

2013 will give us a 22nm or possibly even a 18nm console. Compared to the 40nm card we currently have we could see a 4 to 5 times increase in rendering power . Ram would most likely hit 8 gigs and we would possibly see 8 core cpus in the console.

Impressive numbers do not a viable console make.

 

[iamshadowlark]

No. To all of it, no.

22nm is a bit of a stretch yes, but almost all of what said is possible. Depending on how they want to develop there consoles you could def see 8gbs of ram. And as far as CPU you saw 6 in CELL this year what makes you think 8 is so impossible?

 

[patsu]

PS3 Cell is 8 cores. 7 SPUs + 1 PPU.

I don't know about the other parameters though. Number of cores doesn't really say much without understanding the architecture.

 

[Orayn]

22nm is a bit of a stretch yes, but almost all of what said is possible. Depending on how they want to develop there consoles you could def see 8gbs of ram. And as far as CPU you saw 6 in CELL this year what makes you think 8 is so impossible?

Possible? Of course. Lots of insanely expensive, unwieldy configurations are possible on paper. It's just not likely. Both Microsoft and Sony got burned in various ways by hot, expensive, top of the line hardware. I don't mean to say that their next systems will be underpowered, but it's not unreasonable to think that they'll take a more measured approach to keep things reasonably priced and free of issues like the RROD.
I do not want "next-gen graphics" to come at the cost of overheating $700 boxes.

 

[Jokeropia]

Where are Jokeropedia's charts when you need them.

Ready to be posted when requested.

 

[StevieP]

22nm is a bit of a stretch yes, but almost all of what said is possible. Depending on how they want to develop there consoles you could def see 8gbs of ram. And as far as CPU you saw 6 in CELL this year what makes you think 8 is so impossible?

1) TSMC is having a hard time making 28nm for a PAPER LAUNCH IN 2012. Ponder that for a second. They've also delayed 22nm until 2014. Guess what - stuff that's having a tough time being fabricated with enough volume for 2014 is not going into a console that's releasing in 2013.

2) 8GB of ram of the type that goes into consoles (which is MUCH faster and MUCH lower latency than the kind that goes into PC, hence MUCH more expensive) would be unfeasable and overkill, to say the least. If your console is releasing in 2013, be happy with a shared pool of 2GB of XDR/GDDR5/etc. Even the highest top-end PC games of today don't use 4GB of ram, and they're contending with 1-2GB of ram usage by the OS.

3) Developers hate the Cell. The SPUs are cumbersome, to say the least. Beyond the cell - in the space of regular multicore CPUs, it's the same situation as with the ram. If developers aren't going to use 8 cores, why bother? Because they're not. Most games and programs today don't even take advantage of 4. To have an 8 core CPU in a console, it would draw a lot of heat/power, so you'd have to downclock it to make it feasable as well. Games benefit a lot more from raw power than they do parallellizataion.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

This might be the best place to ask this, althought it is slightly OT. A couple of weeks (months?) ago a thread was made that a magazine (I think GameInformer) was going to reveal a game from, I kind of quote, 'the guys that brought you *** and fucking ****'. So what was this magazine and what was the reveal, or isn't it there yet? I searched but for the life of me I cannot find it.

It was Game Informer. New stealth/action FP game from some of the guys behind Deus Ex and Dark Messiah.

 

[iamshadowlark]

PS3 Cell is 8 cores. 7 SPUs + 1 PPU.

I don't know about the other parameters though. Number of cores doesn't really say much without understanding the architecture.

Yea remember one was shut off for redundancy. And yes I do know the architecture.

 

[patsu]

The 8th SPU was shut off. 9 cores for the complete Cell.

 

[Raistlin]

Funny also a Crytek guy said Avatar-like visuals are possible on today's [high-end] DX11 hardware.

Yeah it would be nice to get more context with that statement.


Based on what Epic and Crytek have been saying (both here and in other interviews, etc), I think what they're getting at is that DX 11 really hasn't been tapped at all. As engine makers they haven't really figured out all the effects that can be done with it, and what they have is certainly not optimized fully. Samaritan was meant to get a feel for where they are heading with it. More importantly though, devs really don't know how to best use even the current tools, let alone the fact it will be quite some time before they grasp whatever new stuff hits later on.

So basically they're speculating that later on, a good dev could get a nice approximation of Avatar at least if you're simply looking at a screen shot. But you have to think about the context of what that translates to insofar as a real game.

• Even if they can get a decent approximation of the IQ and effects at certain viewpoints, they won't necessarily be able to stand up at other viewpoints. You can't expect things to hold up if you zoom into something super close.

• Disregarding the above, there's the question of asset consistently. Budget constraints make it impossible to keep everything at a consistent level for a large-scale game, even assuming the tech could actually support it.

• The biggest issue when comparing CGI to realtime gaming is animation. While I'm sure techniques will improve, it's unrealistic to assume getting such consistent animation is even technically possible at this point ... whether budget constraints could allow it or not.

• Another issue is that playable camera angles can't really get you the drama of a movie.

 

[iamshadowlark]

Possible? Of course. Lots of insanely expensive, unwieldy configurations are possible on paper. It's just not likely. Both Microsoft and Sony got burned in various ways by hot, expensive, top of the line hardware. I don't mean to say that their next systems will be underpowered, but it's not unreasonable to think that they'll take a more measured approach to keep things reasonably priced and free of issues like the RROD.
I do not want "next-gen graphics" to come at the cost of overheating $700 boxes.

Yes but when people point to omg this gen was 599$ they aren't understanding where and why those costs came and why most of them won't be returning next gen. I suggest looking up the first teardowns of the ps3.

 

[Raistlin]

22nm is a bit of a stretch yes, but almost all of what said is possible. Depending on how they want to develop there consoles you could def see 8gbs of ram. And as far as CPU you saw 6 in CELL this year what makes you think 8 is so impossible?

o'rly

 

[iamshadowlark]

The 8th SPU was shut off. 9 cores for the complete Cell.

You are absolutely right and I am a dumbass.

 

[Frankfurt]

It was Game Informer. New stealth/action FP game from some of the guys behind Deus Ex and Dark Messiah.

Named Dishonored:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=436899

 

[velvet_nitemare]

Very happy with a 2013 Nextbox/PS4 release. Next E3 should be epic.

 

[bgassassin]

I really wonder if people are acknowledging the costs involved with memory because it gets thrown out there quite often about having at least 4GB.

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/12066/Microsoft-to-Epic-You-Cost-Me-a-Billion-Dollars/

"So we argued, and argued, and what Tim did is he actually sent a screenshot of what Gears of War would look like if we only had 256 megs of memory. So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developed they called; we were at Game Developers Conference, was it two years ago, and then I got a call from the Chief Financial Officer of MGS and he said 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' and I said, 'we did a favor for a billion gamers'."

*still waiting to see a billion gamers for MS by the way*

Anyway adding 256MB of memory for the 360 cost MS around an extra $1 billion. Even if memory is 1/4 of what it cost back then, 4GB will still roughly cost them twice as much to implement it now as opposed to back then. Now Sony and/or MS may be crazy enough to do it, but there really isn't much to justify it.

 

[[Nintex]]

I really wonder if people are acknowledging the costs involved with memory because it gets thrown out there quite often about having at least 4GB.

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/12066/Microsoft-to-Epic-You-Cost-Me-a-Billion-Dollars/



*still waiting to see a billion gamers for MS by the way*

Anyway adding 256MB of memory for the 360 cost MS around an extra $1 billion. Even if memory is 1/4 of what it cost back then, 4GB will still roughly cost them twice as much to implement it now as opposed to back then. Now Sony and/or MS may be crazy enough to do it, but there really isn't much to justify it.

The problem was that they had to go back and redesign the hardware to add in 256MB RAM, if they set a RAM ammount of 4GB from the start they won't have to redo the design this time.

 

[bgassassin]

The problem was that they had to go back and redesign the hardware to add in 256MB RAM, if they set a RAM ammount of 4GB from the start they won't have to redo the design this time.

I would assume a redesign didn't have that much impact since that happened at least a year before launch.

EDIT: I think a better way to say this is that since this happened so far out from the launch date I would assume it would have cost the same if the changes were the original plan. The memory and component changes to handle the extra memory still would more than likely be the same components and in turn have the same cost. Whether you start with a $10 component or start with an $8 component and go to a $10 one, you're still paying the $10.

 

[sTeLioSco]

The problem was that they had to go back and redesign the hardware to add in 256MB RAM, if they set a RAM ammount of 4GB from the start they won't have to redo the design this time.

ok for a console in '13 2gb ram i think is a safe bet.
we could see 3gb,4gb i wouldn't beton it but would be great....

 

[BlueTsunami]

Reading all these rumors, I'm so ready for nextgen

 

[iamshadowlark]

1) TSMC is having a hard time making 28nm for a PAPER LAUNCH IN 2012. Ponder that for a second. They've also delayed 22nm until 2014. Guess what - stuff that's having a tough time being fabricated with enough volume for 2014 is not going into a console that's releasing in 2013.
.

I don't know what you're trying to point out as i already stated it was a stretch.

2) 8GB of ram of the type that goes into consoles (which is MUCH faster and MUCH lower latency than the kind that goes into PC, hence MUCH more expensive) would be unfeasable and overkill, to say the least. If your console is releasing in 2013, be happy with a shared pool of 2GB of XDR/GDDR5/etc. Even the highest top-end PC games of today don't use 4GB of ram, and they're contending with 1-2GB of ram usage by the OS.

Again this is like the nth time you've tried to point out that consoles don't use ddr3 or the such and I've already pointed out that im very aware of that fact, in fact I also pointed out how trivial the cost of XDR was to the $599 ps3. 6 years later and that cost is less than half of what it was. And yes 8gb is quite overkill, but it definitely would not cause a result of $599. Also how funny of you to point out how todays high end pc games don't use 4gb of ram, when in reality today's best of the best on pc would be a launch quality title on a 2013 console. You must haven't noticed how every console generation is lasting longer and longer, and in 2017 there is no telling what memory requirements games would have. I definitely think 3gb would be the sweet spot for next gen, with 4gb to be safe and 2gb at a very minimum.

3) Developers hate the Cell. The SPUs are cumbersome, to say the least. Beyond the cell - in the space of regular multicore CPUs, it's the same situation as with the ram. If developers aren't going to use 8 cores, why bother? Because they're not. Most games and programs today don't even take advantage of 4. To have an 8 core CPU in a console, it would draw a lot of heat/power, so you'd have to downclock it to make it feasable as well. Games benefit a lot more from raw power than they do parallellizataion.

This is patently false. If anything most devs have sung nothing but praise of CELL and more particularly the SPUs once they became comfortable with it. Its sony's other weird choices(split memory pools, low bandwith, etc) that people complained mostly about. Its pretty much in sony's best interest to continue with whatever cell has become at IBM.As for your last point, the entire computing industry has pretty much decided that going forward, expansion will be achieved by adding more and more processing units to an ICB. Even though your claim about devs and parallelization is almost completely off base, even if they were fed up with it, they don't have much choice because the industry has spoken. The days of simply adding more transistors and increasing clocks has ended.

 

[Luckyman]

If he can evade the banhammer (despite posting factual inaccuracies like that), you should be able to do the same.

Eurogamer should clearly be blocked for people with Mario glasses. This guy obviously don't know anything better go with Nintendo GAF dreams.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-e3-nintendo?page=3

There is still discussion amongst fans of an enthusiast-level gaming GPU in the machine, but the fact that the Wii U itself is quite small would present some serious heat dissipation issues - the pre-production units photographed at E3 certainly possess a lot more vents than the original Wii. Curiously, the diminutive form factor of the console itself tells us far more about the potential power of the machine than Nintendo's own spec sheet.

At this point we're speculating, but our guess is that Wii U's RAM is based on GDDR3 or DDR3 - far more cost efficient than the top-end GDDR5 and the hitherto non-existent DDR4. In terms of the make-up of AMD's custom Radeon GPU, we reckon it probably has more in common with the Radeon HD 4650/4670 as opposed to anything more exotic. The 320 stream processors on those chips would have more than enough power to support 360 and PS3 level visuals, especially in a closed-box system. Fabricated on AMD's current 40nm process, it would be cool enough and cheap enough, but the 2012 launch may well mean that Nintendo could move directly to 28nm, making for a more cost-efficient, cooler box.

 

[Eteric Rice]

"In terms of something aimed at running Samaritan, I don't think it would be practical to come out with a new console at that spec right now," Rein continues, "I think we're a few years away from that kind of hardware being available at a price consumers would embrace.


I found this part to be most interesting.

This should have been obvious to people who aren't insane.

 

[bgassassin]

Eurogamer should clearly be blocked for people with Mario glasses. This guy obviously don't know anything better go with Nintendo GAF dreams.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-e3-nintendo?page=3

What I find amazing is that you say it as fact when they themselves say:

At this point we're speculating

 

[Louis Cyphre]

This coming from someone who doesn't realize the difference between initially selling hardware at a loss, and never turning a profit at all

True. Not only that but Sony not only dropped the price of the PS3 faster than anyone they also had to do it much more frequently this generation to remain competitive. On the flip-side Sony did manage to get people to adopt Blu-ray which I assume they get royalties from on movies using the format as well.

 

[Louis Cyphre]

Microsoft is rumoured to be preparing a reveal of its next Xbox at E3 2012. Eurogamer has recently had this claim backed up by a number of game industry sources.

Eurogamer has also heard a 2014 release of the next Xbox was planned by Microsoft, but this has now been brought forward to 2013 as a result of Nintendo's confirmed 2012 launch of the Wii U.

Additionally, sources have indicated to us that larger publishers and developers already have target specs of both the next Xbox and PlayStation to help them with their development.

I'm not sure how much of that I am led to actually believe. I can't honestly think Microsoft was ever planning on coasting to 2014 until their next Xbox. Sure they are treating Kinect as a whole new launch but that is still a long ways away and would mean the Xbox 360 would be 9 years old by then.

 

[-viper-]

You can keep telling yourself this, but GTA, Halo have always been casual. Or as was the term in previous generations mainstream.

GTA is a very tough game. GTA4 is not casual friendly! Some of the missions are fucking brutal. There is no regenerating health and missions are hardly scattered with health pack. You have to go out your own way to buy weapons and armor too.

 

[CadetMahoney]

I just hope that both MS and Sony don't try and achieve performance parity with each other to court 3rd parties. That is bullshit. I want both of them to go different routes like this gen.

Sony clearly had a vision with the PS3 and lots of hype with blu-ray and the cell. They're still gonna use cell right?

 

[AlStrong]

The problem was that they had to go back and redesign the hardware to add in 256MB RAM, if they set a RAM ammount of 4GB from the start they won't have to redo the design this time.

It shouldn't cost the bulk of a billion dollars to add more chips to the design. That's just ludicrous. They hadn't even started manufacturing of the retail unit until a few months before launch.

Doubling the number of high end RAM chips including the additions to the motherboard would be much more significant. At the tail end of 2005, GDDR3 700MHz chips were new and supply limited. It was one of the factors for limited 360 production that year (2005-2006).

 

[Shin Johnpv]

GTA is a very tough game. GTA4 is not casual friendly! Some of the missions are fucking brutal. There is no regenerating health and missions are hardly scattered with health pack. You have to go out your own way to buy weapons and armor too.

I would bet money that more than half the people who play GTA, don't do more than 1/3 of the missions and spend more time just roaming around doing random shit.

 

[zeioIIDX]

I would bet money that more than half the people who play GTA, don't do more than 1/3 of the missions and spend more time just roaming around doing random shit.

Guilty as charged. Although I eventually reached the last mission of GTA III and Vice City but once I hit San Andreas...forget it.

 

[OldJadedGamer]

Next gen will be about new services and social features rather than hardware bumps. Last gen I would have no idea just how important downloadable smaller games was going to be to my gaming. I can't live without them now but last gen I would have passed on them and that is just one example of the jump from last gen.

So the things I'm excited for next gen are things I don't know I want yet.

 

[Tom Penny]

Specs mean nothing. Wii proved graphics and horsepower are not really relevant to gaming.

 

[AranhaHunter]

The 8th SPU was shut off. 9 cores for the complete Cell.

And one is reserved for the OS, so developers only have access to 6 SPUs and the PPU IIRC.

 

[iamshadowlark]

Specs mean nothing. Wii proved graphics and horsepower are not really relevant to gaming.

Yea until its sales completely bottomed out and it lost almost all third party support.