PLAYSTATION 4
There was Method in the madness
This was a sleeping giant from a company desperate to avoid the missteps of PS3’s launch. On the surface Sony put on a show; we had a live performance from Tinie Tempah and a plush event at the PS4 Lounge in London’s Covent Garden, and queues of fans lined up for the midnight launch with only free Red Bull to keep them warm. Behind the scenes, though, Sony had limited stock of its eagerly awaited console, and the stuttering start of PS3 weighed as heavily as a weekend hangover.
Sony needn’t have feared. The price was right (at E3 earlier that year there had been gasps when its price was announced to be £349), the games were on point, and PS4 shifted 250,000 units in its first weekend on sale, almost twice the number Xbox One sold over its launch weekend. In the US PS4 topped one million sales. The down side? PS4 consoles were scarce. The people queuing on this cold winter night clutching a can of energy drink were doing it out of necessity as pre-orders had sold out and this was their only chance to get a PS4 before the new year.
THE PRICE WAS RIGHT
“We really wanted to offer some way for people to buy on launch day, and this is a fantastic opportunity for anyone that hasn’t already pre-ordered to get their hands on a PS4 on day one,” said Sony’s Fergal Gara on the night.
Sony had gone back to basics and rediscovered the secret to PlayStation’s success: a good price, game-focussed hardware, and games we wanted to play.
PS4’s success began seven years earlier, in 2006, three weeks before PS3 was about to be unveiled at E3, when Shuhei Yoshida was asked to create a motion-sensor game for the event. The demo of Warhawk was a mess. The problem was clear: game and hardware designers weren’t talking.
For PS4, Sony hired Mark Cerny to develop the hardware. He’s a software guy, and had a hand in some of videogames’ most prominent moments. In the 1980s, when he was 17, he created Marble Madness for Atari. Later he oversaw the development of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro The Dragon for PlayStation. Cerny wanted to build a console that devs needed. He asked 16 internal studios and 16 external developers for their needs, and set about making the hardware they wanted.
“The thought was that we would start with a more open process, a more collaborative look at what worked and what didn’t,” Cerny told Wired back in 2013. “I did something that would have been unthinkable in 2004: I went to about 30 game teams about what they would like to see in the nextgeneration hardware.”
CELL OUT SONY
This was an adaptation of The Method, Cerny’s philosophy to making games, in which you streamline the process, make a prototype, see what works, and expel what doesn’t. For PS4 it meant the Cell was out and a custom AMD chip and synergised CPU and GPU were in; 8GB of GDDR5 RAM was demanded from all developers to future-proof PS4.
At launch the console had 21 games, seven of them exclusive. The thirdparty ones were optimised for PS4, and upgrades could be downloaded post-release, albeit for a price.
“THE PRICE WAS RIGHT, THE GAMES WERE ON POINT, AND PS4 SHIFTED 250,000 UNITS IN ITS FIRST WEEKEND.”