John Carmack, technical director at id Software, the guys behind such games as Doom and the Quake series, has predicted that the PlayStation 4 will be the first onto the market, for the next generation. This, of course, would be a change in the wind, as the PS3 was heavily criticized for releasing a full year behind the Xbox 360.
“The whole jockeying for who’s going to release the first next-gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things. Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely.
As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We’d like to see it be quite a few more years before the next-gen consoles comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later.”
Carmack went on to predict that at least one of the successors to the PS3, 360 or Wii, will ship without a physical medium.
“I think that Xbox Live and the advent of that and the App Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital distribution.
I think there’s a decent chance that one of the next-gen consoles will be without optical media. The uptake rates of people who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It’s higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people expected.”
So what do you think? Will Sony stay the course and save PS4 for a later date, or “jump the gun” and try to be first to market like the 360? Let us know in the comment section below!
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