SonyPlayStation4.org

What was once the market leader in gaming technology is now starting to look like an out-of-shape, former heavyweight champion, trying to live off his past glory. It’s no secret that Sony Computer Entertainment has been in financial trouble for quite some time. As recent as May, 2009 Sony’s gaming division reported a loss of nearly $420 million. Meanwhile, the leaner Nintendo Corporation has managed to build a product that is fun to play and cheap to produce. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is humming along quite nicely with its low price and superior selection of games.

So so you think Sony feels any pressure to turn things around in a hurry? But when Sony released the PlayStation 3 it was with the understanding that it would be around for 8 to 10 years. And game developers who’ve become accustomed to writing for the PS3 are in no hurry to move outside their comfort zones. Certainly, not many PS3 owners who dropped 500 or 600 bucks on a new console are ready to see their investments become yesterday’s news anytime soon. So what to do?

The answer is that Sony may not have much of a choice. This is about business, and sometimes tough choices must be made in the name of survival. Under better economic circumstances, things might have panned out a little better. Maybe fewer consumers would have been drawn to cheaper products like Nintendo’s Wii. Maybe the PlayStation 3 could have at least turned a profit for Sony. Four years ago, the thought of releasing a PlayStation 4 before the year 2013 would have seemed crazy. But the way things are shaping up — and shaking down — I’d be surprised if a PlayStation 4 weren’t on the shelves by Christmas of 2012.

Thinking about the next PlayStation, the PS4, it’s almost presumed that the games will be packaged and sold as Blu-Ray disks. But does this really make sense versus the transformation that is taking place in the way intellectual property like books, motion pictures, music, software, television programs, and video games are packaged, stored and delivered? No longer does content need to be bound in a physical form and sold as a tangible item. Instead, it is transmitted as packets of pure information via a high-speed connection. This transformation from physical to ethereal media is ultimately limited only by bandwidth. In short digital distribution is the future.

Consider the fact that Atlantic Records, a division of Warner Music Group, reported in November 2008 that a majority of its music sales are now from digital downloads.  Consider a recent report by Forrester Research which projects that digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012. People are just plain tired of having to leave their homes to purchase or rent clunky physical storage containers like CD’s and DVD’s just to access digital content that could be downloaded from the convenience of their own homes via a broadband connection.  So what parallels to this can be found in the video gaming industry? And what effect, if any, will this transformation have on the next generation of video gaming systems?

Quite simply, future gaming systems will likely be browser-based; maybe not the PS4, but almost certainly the PS5.  David Lau-Kee, co-founder of Renderware developer Criterion, ex-Electronic Arts VP and the current executive for Kerb Games and Unity has recently went so far as to predict that the “PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 are going to be browsers.”  This is a pretty bold prediction from someone who is understandably biased toward web-based gaming.

Whether or not this turns out to be true for the PS4, the PS5 will almost certainly be a browser-based, all-purpose entertainment system with specialized video gaming capabilities. The demand is there. But will the bandwidth be there soon enough? We’ll have to wait and see.

While gamers, for the moment, are content with their PS3’s it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate as to the next iteration of the Sony PlayStation, the PS4. The concept shown in this image recently surfaced amid rumors that Crytek has already begun developing games for the next generation PlayStation.