Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s PlayStation 4 will be more competitively priced out of the gate than its PS3 predecessor, insiders suggest, with the company reportedly aiming at knocking a quarter off the console’s original selling price. Leaked internal documents supposedly obtained by The Times [subscription required] indicate the PS4 will be sold at around £300 when it launches, £100 less than demanded for the PS3 at its launch back in 2006.

US pricing isn’t suggested by the newspaper, but a similarly trimmer cost is likely to follow. At its release, the PS3 was priced at $499 for the entry-level, 20GB model, which if the UK price whispers are true suggests a starting point more along the lines of $399.

That would leave the PS4 still more expensive than the Wii U, the only other next-gen console on the market today, though with what are tipped to be considerably more impressive specifications. The device – believed to be codenamed “Orbis” internally – is expected to be more powerful and more graphically capable than its Nintendo counterpart, with recent leaks suggesting Sony will include Gaikai-powered game streaming.

Arguably, the days when Sony could charge what it liked for a new PlayStation are behind it. Although the console was praised at launch, the Xbox 360 has comprehensively clung to the top sales spot for months on end, and Sony’s financial results in gaming have been left hurting as a result.

Meanwhile, more casual gaming systems, such as Kickstarter success OUYA, have opened the door to more affordable consoles, borrowing mainstream chips more commonly found in smartphones and tablets to keep prices low. Sony is expected to detail the PlayStation 4 more thoroughly at an event in New York on Wednesday.

[Image via GameTrailers]

Sony PlayStation 4 price slash strategy tipped amid console competition is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, just sat down alongside Nancy Tellem, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft LA Studios, to kick off this year’s rendition of D:Dive Into Media here in Dana Point, Calif. The first session of the evening is being piloted by AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka, and naturally, the topic of conversation is Xbox. For starters, Mehdi affirmed that Microsoft is witnessing an unmistakable transition of the Xbox 360 “from a gaming console to an entertainment console.” At present, the install base is up to 76 million (up from around 70 million at the close of September 2012), with US-based users using the console for some 87 hours per month.

In fact, he stated that 18 billion (yeah, with a “B”) hours of entertainment have been consumed on Xbox, and while Netflix is obviously the driving force, it might not be that way for much longer. He was quick to claim that Sony’s PlayStation 3 “isn’t as good of an entertainment console” — something he feels that “everybody knows” — and insinuated that the next-generation Xbox will stick to “big and premium.” In other words, don’t expect Microsoft to kick out a $50 Roku-style content box. Mehdi wants to ensure that the future of Xbox enables voice control, interactivity, and “other stuff that’s big and beautiful.”

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft

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The OUYA Android-based gaming console will get hardware refreshes on an annual basis, founder and CEO Julie Uhrman revealed in an interview with Engadget. Uhrman was at DICE, an annual summit that focuses on video games, where she also announced new game publisher partners for the OUYA platform. The refresh cycle will more closely resemble those of smartphones than those of traditional consoles, which generally enjoy multi-year lifespans extending into double digits.

“There will be a new OUYA every year. There will be an OUYA 2 and an OUYA 3,” Uhrman told Engadget in an interview. That’s a pretty bold declaration of intent from a company that, while immensely successful in their Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, has yet to actually ship production-ready OUYA 1 devices out to the general public, though they have already secured retail partners.

There are a few reasons why current big name consoles have the long life that they do. A lot of money goes into their initial development, for one, meaning that manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft often sell them at a loss for years before they begin to turn a profit on hardware. And there are advantages to this model for the consumer, too: Users don’t have to worry about their hardware and software library becoming obsolete all that quickly when you’ve got a dependable, multi-year upgrade cycle.

Uhrman explains that all games on OUYA will be backwards compatible, at least in so far as they’ll be tied to user accounts independent of hardware, rather than linked to hardware itself. All-digital delivery means that this is easier to accomplish, since there’s no messy business like disc formats to worry about.

Plans for future versions of the console include faster processors, and potentially expanding storage beyond the current 8 GB included. At CES this year, Qualcomm and Nvidia both unveiled next-gen processors, so those are likely candidates for future updates, since the emphasis will be on eking out as much graphics performance as possible from the diminutive OUYA box. The current generation OUYA, when it ships, will have a Tegra 3 on board running at 1.6GHz, which should serve it well, at least compared to current generation smartphones.

While it’s somewhat refreshing to see a consumer electronics maker talk in concrete terms about their future product pipeline, you have to wonder whether or not it’s the right move. Uhrman is now essentially committed to an annual update cycle, which puts pressure on the company to deliver that going forward, and which also means consumers are well aware that if they just wait a little while, they can get hardware with better specs. Plus, if the market turns out to be competitive, there’s no mystery about what your upgrade strategy is for potential rivals.

It’s not necessarily surprising that OUYA wants to update annually; the platform they’re creating is well-suited to a frequent update cycle, and that could be one good way to make inroads against the major players, which remain relatively constant for around a decade. But whatever the company’s plans at this point, it still has to ship and then win over consumers before it can put any of them into action.

After OUYA‘s immense Kickstarter success, the company is looking to branch out and go mainstream. The portable Android-powered gaming console will begin selling in select retail stores starting in June. Best Buy, Target, and GameStop will sell the console for $99, the same price that Kickstarter backers have been paying for the device.

The console will also be available online at the company’s website and on Amazon. Of course, though, Kickstarter backers will be the first to get their units. Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman says that Kickstarter backers will receive their consoles in March, while orders from the OUYA website will go out in April, and retail stores will begin selling them in June. You can pre-order the console now through Amazon, Best Buy, or Target.

The console will sell for $99.99, and it’ll come with one controller. An extra controller will cost you $49.99 in retail stores, while getting one on OUYA’s website will only cost $40 shipped. Paying $50 for a controller certainly isn’t outrageous, but it raises some concerns when a controller costs half the price of the console itself. Uhrman says that $49.99 is a “premium price” for a controller, indeed, but she says that the touchpad built into the controller makes up for the cost.

The OUYA console raised more than $8.5 million on Kickstarter and has been taking pre-orders for the consoles on its website. There are over 68,000 consoles that need to be shipped out so far, with potentially even more orders to come no doubt. The tiny Android-powered gaming console is already a huge hit, and we’re pretty excited to see how the OUYA community will grow once the consoles start selling.

[via WSJ]

OUYA to be sold at retail stores starting in June is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Good news: Sony has revealed a new PlayStation console! But it’s not what you think. Instead, there’s an Ice Silver edition PlayStation Vita reaching Asian countries from February 28th onwards. The new hue is attached to a WiFi model and marks the fourth special color we’ve seen in just over a year since the Vita hit shops, joining the more ostentatious blue, red and white shades from 2012. Hong Kong residents will pay HK$2,280 (US$294) to stand out from the crowd on the 28th, with launches also known to be coming later to Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. There’s no word on if or when silver might reach other parts of the world, although Sony might not want to wait too long for any further expansion — it’s likely that a color addition will be the last thing on gamers’ minds in a few weeks’ time.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

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Via: Joystiq

Source: PlayStation Asia (1), (2), (3)