PS4 Pro Speculation (PS4K NEO Kaio-Ken-Kutaragi-Kaz Neo-san)

299 would make an impact too, plus more money.

 

299 will make an immediate impact; not huge but decent. Enough to at least stay competitive with the XB1 S this year in NA IMO.

I'm guessing the PS4 slim will be 249 around the holidays with possible bundles. I think Sony will also bundle the slim with a fairly high profile title and make it the main SKU in Q1 2017 and sell it for 299 (maybe CoD again?).

 

A $299 PS4 Slim would give WW sales a healthy bump. A $249 PS4 Slim would effectively kill off the Xbox One entirely. I could see sales in the US increasing 50% with a tail off of Xbox sales and we would likely see a 3:1 ratio WW rather than the current 2:1 ratio Sony currently has.

 

If Sony isn't dropping price for PS4 slim more than they rumorly are, that means they're confident that sales are good enough to sustain this level of pricing. It's also good for the bottom line of a corp who has been struggling a lot with losses for years and years.

 

Also Sony can not do US only pricing and sales like MS does.

 

They are because without the Neo they don't have a single new thing to show on that day. We've even had a friggin' video teardown of the Slim.
That thing is as good as old news by now. And so is PSVR. They can't show VR games in any meaningful way in a stage, so until that thing is shipping in retail stores no one is going to give it proper value.

 

I've got to agree with ToTTenTranz, if they're not introducing Neo they'd be best off canceling the event and just announce the slim via press release. There's just no good way to go from a non-Neo press event.

 

Unless there's a Vita 2.

Pleeease let there be a Vita 2!

 

I don't see Sony pulling price $100 down from 350 to 250. PS4 is selling to good for them to loose so much money. Most likely they will drop PS4 Slim to $300 now [with brief $250 offering for key sales days], and keep the $250 price drop in pocket for the time when Scorpio is near.

Price drop of Neo before arrival of Scorpio could also be very significant for PS4 platform sales. Heh, we need to start thinking about PS4 as a platform now, it will soon have more than one HW SKU.

 

PS4 was unveiled 9 months before launch (detailed specs and architecture), and they only had the physical console and the price to announce 5 months before launch. A September Neo announcement could mean a launch in February or March?

I think Vita 2 would only make sense if it's VR. This could have the same impact as PSVR. Sony would have a head start with the first portable VR in a controlled console environment, fixed platform, subsidized hardware, etc... Not sure they would take another risk into portable gaming though.

 

No. Andrew House mentioned that since Neo is not a new generation of HW, they will adopt more "apple-like" approach with the unveiling of it [which means really fast deployment after announcement]. I still expect it to be launched this year, barring some manufacturing issue.

It does not have to be that way. Sony could just release Vita Neo, totally backwards compatible successor that enhances controls [into full DS4 set] and offers more processing power. That way they could retire Vita, produce new [and hopefully cheaper device] and retain their presence in portable market which is still viable in Japan. If they did that I don't expect a large 3rd party AAA support, but constant stream of indie titles and Japan sales could make Vita Neo proffitable.

I would be happy with that kind of device. Better controls, better features, regular arrival of portable-friendly games.

 

Now I've thought about it, I totally agree. The PS4 Slim will be $299 ($50 off the current PS4 RRP), although we will maybe see a $249 PS4 during Black Friday etc. I also agree that they will permanently reduce the price of the PS4 to $249 next year as well.

The Neo, as I've mentioned before will more than likely be $399 or $449. Assuming it releases this year then I can see it getting a $50 price cut right before the Scorpio is released (Nov 2017), meaning it should be $349 or $399 by then. Will the Scorpio be able to release at $399???? I seriously doubt it.

 

Few things we know of Scorpio hardware that will have higher price:
- APU will be larger [more advanced CPU and larger GPU module], and larger die size means larger base cost and larger secondary costs [PSU, cooling].
- it will have 12 GDDR5/X chips, which will cost more than what neo Neo has [barring Cerny megaton unveil that Sony has again switched to clamshell mode and added more ram], and cause increased secondary cost [mobo complexity].

But even with all that, MS could eat money and sell Scorpio below manufacturing cost.

 

For me, a megaton would be something like:
- 32bit wide DDR4 bus, 4GB for the OS
- Full 8GB GDDR5 available for games
- 1TB single SKU
- $449
- November

*Cerny drops mic*

 

Any source for the bolded? Gddr5x doesn't even make sense with the official specs given by MS. And i measured the die, the modules on that render appear to be gddr5 (exact dimensions).

 

Yeah if it's 12 chips like what we see on the rendered PCB in the Scorpio's reveal video, it can't be GDDR5X or the total bandwidth would be at least 480GB/s (against the already announced 320GB/s).

 

Yeah I still don't get how they can get significantly higher render resolutions by giving the developers access to only 512MB more RAM from the whole pool.
I get that doubling to 16GB would be a complete overkill, but couldn't they just upgrade to 10GB using one of those nvidia 660Ti-like methods? Just lock those slower and extra 2GB for system usage and let there be more memory for graphics. The Jaguars in the original Liverpool diagrams can't access the main system at more than 20GB/s anyway...

 

I'd be happy with a clean slate Vita successor if all of its titles were compatible with the PS4. It'd give indies and Japanese devs relatively easy access to an enormous global audience, and give the PlayStation brand a sense of unity as a platform.

 

If they have not added a better CPU and added a larger GPU (or overclocked the existing one) Sony needs to go for the lowest price possible. Their only hope of defeating the Scorpio with significantly high specs will be to have a massive user base that they can use to demand games made exclusively for the PS4 and NEO.

 

Or compete on price and popularity. Doesn't need exclusive games when the platform all your mates are playing COD on is PS4.