At its media event tonight, Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4. Andrew House, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, introduced Mark Cerny as the lead system architect.

Cerny called it a "supercharged" PC, with an X86 CPU and 8GB of GDDR-5 memory, 8 CPU cores, 2 Tflops of processing. He called it "a platform for game creators by game creators," and showed off the new DualShock 4. It boasts improved latency and rumbling, along with a stereo camera and light bar to keep track of the controller.

Cerny then detailed the ease-of-use for the consumer. The PlayStation 4 includes a suspend/resume button like the Vita, letting you shut down and pick up a game quickly. Digital titles will be playable as they're being downloaded, since you can start playing and have the rest download in the background. It also, as rumored, will always be recording video and allows you to share it via a dedicated "Share" button. This also means you'll be able to view and comment on streams of your friends. The friends network will use "real world friends," letting you import friends from existing social networks in addition to your PSN ID friends. Sony is also planning companion apps on tablets and Vita, similar to the Wii U's Miiverse.

The console is aiming to have predictive game downloads based on your preferences and history, so you'll find content pre-loaded on your system. Cerny says the goal is to reduce download time to zero by predicting what you'll want to play.

Gaikai CEO Dave Perry finally shed light on how Sony will use the acquisition. He said that when browsing any game, you can press X to instantly try it out. Perry said he supports the idea: "try it for free, share it if you like it, and pay only if you love it." The Vita will also support Remote Play to "instantly" switch screens via Gaikai technology.

The "longterm goal" is to make all PS4 games playable on Vita, implying that some may not be at first. PlayStation 3 games won't be natively playable on the PS4, as rumored, but Gaikai seems to be Sony's solution. "We could one day put PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS Mobile games on any device, including PS4." Their philosophy is said to be "everything everywhere." The title PlayStation Cloud was only teased, with more details promised later.

Near the end of the presentation, the console was confirmed for a holiday 2013 release.

article from Shacknews, Steve Watts

I love this stage of each console generation, when they throw up nonsense like "2 Tflops of processing" as if anyone even knew what that means (or as if it were a big deal anyway), and they make insane promises like "reducing download time to zero by predicting what you'll want to play" --that one is almost as funny as the promise that the hard drive of the original Xbox would make loading times obsolete, or listening to Molyneux droning on about "emotion synthesis" back in 1999. Ah, what comedy.

Also, "supercharged" my ass. The CPU has 8 cores, right, but it's basically a mobile AMD CPU, which means a mid-range 6-core desktop CPU *today* blows it out of the water. The GPU is pretty decent, and they put a dedicated chip to handle physics, which is nice; but, again, that's nothing that a regular SLI setup can't easily match (or hasn't been doing for years, for that matter).

All in all, as some had predicted long ago, the jump in horsepower is nowhere near as big as it was in the last generation, and the funny thing is that now platform exclusives will make even less sense than ever, since the thing is indeed pretty much a PC. I'm really interested to know how much it will cost, because anything above some 600 US dollars will be outright thievery.

The demo for Watch Dogs was pretty cool, though.

Doc's post pretty much sums up this.

"Given that the next Xbox will supposedly launch at 8GB, it only seems right that Sony also sticks in a full 8GB of GDDR 5 RAM. Impressive, but it seems like massive overkill to me, so I’ll recommend 8GB of DDR3 RAM."

...what's the point of writing an article about building a comparable rig if you're not going to build a comparable rig?

Also, a Windows PC has a heck of a lot more overhead than a games console running a dashboard and nothing else, so with the same spec you're going to get less performance simply by nature.

Then again, on a PC you can always tweak particularly power-hungry features of games one way or another, which can more than offset that difference; so there's WAY more value on those pieces than it would seem at first sight.

Anyway, my main point is that the thing is pretty much a slightly shinier PS3 (with lots of facebook thrown in for good measure). Sure its guts are different, but all in all it's nowhere near the technological leap that the PS3 was compared to PS2. And the worst part is that the extra computational power will account for nicer physics effects and very little more. I would bet an eye that we're still gonna get the same dumbass AI, the same painful loading times and the same uncanny valley dolls as always, only with higher-res textures and a few more polygons, because that's where the hardware "supercharge" is aimed at. It's always the same story, only this time around it doesn't even *look* that much different. Hell, am I the only one who thinks all the games demoed look *exactly* the same as current gen ones? I read a recap of the event today, and the best thing the guy had to say was that in the demo of Generic Space Shooter XLVI there was a lot of guys and explosions on screen and the framerate didn't drop. Is that all it takes to impress people?

That said, I still have some hope for Watch Dogs: At some point there was mention of a pseudo-multiplayer aspect in which people doing their own single player campaign could affect the world as it appears to you. The idea has a certain Dark Souls vibe to it, and as much as I hate multiplayer in general, this kind of thing does sound interesting --at least it would aim to try something more or less new, and it would be doing something useful with the whole always-online thing. And I gotta admit, DS's not-exactly-intrusive-but-kind-of multiplayer is certainly something, and adds a lot to the game.

Oh, and someone needs to shut David Cage up already; I never thought I could loathe a person more than I do Molyneux. Certainly not a person that at some point had David Bowie in one of his games :(

Well, I was playing devil's advocate there a bit. In all honestly, I'm not the least bit interested in the PS4. The only game on display that interested me was The Witness, which I've been interested in since it was announced a couple years ago, and which I'll most likely play on PC anyway.

I did have a good laugh when Jon Blow came on stage with his backhanded comment about explosions.

"I'm Jonathan Blow, and explosions are shit. Let's have a look at some colors!"

Ooh, I always thought your current avatar is scary. Not that I've played Dark Souls I at least know where it's from. Just sayin'.

Praise the sun! :D Frampt is one of my favourite characters in the history of ever.

I'm a little confused, though: You say "I played" as if implying you stopped playing it. I didn't know people could do that :P

I meant to type "now that I've played..."

And by "played" I meant investing 120+ hours into the game, beating it, and waiting for DS 2 now...

...or looking for earlier FromSoftware games - I never cared about this studio before.

Which was the PC version, it seems.

That would be pretty funny. In any case, it sure was in dire need of some v-sync :P

In case anyone wonders, you will still be able to buy used games.

If PS4 is coming out soon, that should means emulators for PS3 should soon be stable then. Not that it matters to me...most of the PlayStation games I want to play are in Japanese. -_-

I hope this feature could be turned off. "Recommended/similar movies" used on, say, IMDb rarely works, games are simpler, but still...

Sony has confirmed that PSN purchases will not be carried over to the PS4. This is basically my greatest fear for digital distribution realized; that content will eventually no longer be available. Best case scenario, we'll be expected to buy what we already own. However, it's almost guaranteed that the bulk of it will never be ported over to the new hardware, and the original PSN Store is almost certain to be shut down after maybe five years.

What was the point of having a unified network account when purchases become obsolete? To an extent, I can understand a lack of backwards compatibility, but this is a kick in the balls to any PSN loyalists who dropped a lot of money on content.

I'm glad these things happen, because the PlayStation has an extremely wide userbase of people who currently aren't educated enough about what the whole digital distribution thing means for them. Stores have closed and made customers lose all their purchases before (Yahoo!/MSN Music, Reflexive Arcade, etc.), but I believe this will be the first time a really huge, integrated system will screw its customers over.

As soon as people start to realise what they actually paid for back when they thought they bought all those games, and Sony goes "sorry, you've bought a new console, and games are a service now! Keep your PS3 or buy everything again!", that should be all it takes for changing many minds. I'm sure seeing the possibility of such a shift during the PS4's planned lifetime is one reason why Sony will keep supporting physical, stand-alone games.

The obnoxious share button is a but funny really. In 5 years time at the latest, people will be snickering at such a remnant from an '00s fad. Which will wind down once the few that actually do these things find out that most of their social network contacts have put them on Ignore because of it.

I also think "supercharged" is a bit of an overstatement. I acknowledge that consoles have much less overhead than a full PC (although I'm not so sure anymore, with all the mandatory peripherals and sharing functionality and social networking integration and whatnot that the OS has to provide in the background), but it's strange for a system that is supposed to deliver cutting-edge games for the next 6 years to settle for 8GB. But they probably want to shave off costs wherever they can. With all the tablet and phone games around, this is not the best of times to ask many people to shell out whatever they're asking for the console.

The predictive downloading is one of those features I'd turn off immediately. Why would I want my bandwidth narrowed and my harddisk filled, for stuff I most likely won't ever use? (As pointed out, automatic recommendations are usually bad.) The try-before-you-buy feature is a good idea, but I hope they'll ask developers to create content limitations for these trials, instead of just letting you play the full version for x minutes. I hate time-limited trials so much that I don't even use them if I'd be interested in a game, because I can't stand the pressure of having to see as much as I need to know in a game before the timer ticks down, and I can't even go to the toilet or pick up the phone without quitting and restarting the game. I want to evaluate a product, not do a speedrun.

Agreed, timed trials are bad, they should look up the old ways instead: do it like shareware (first episode is free) or demo (special level showcasing gameplay).

Nice to see Mark Cerny still working, but I would have preferred a sequel to Marble Madness.

With the talk of the new consoles, I have to ask, when will the Neo Geo X be added to the database?

I just got mine and it's pretty cool. More games are supposed to be released in April, and I'm hoping that they port more than just original Neo Geo arcade and AES games, like maybe Neo Geo Pocket Color games or (as unlikely as this might be), some original new games.