John Carmack (co-founder of id Software) was recently speaking about the future of games with CD-Action. In the half hour long interview they got speaking about next-gen consoles and his thoughts are that Sony could be jumping the gun and bringing out the PS 4 first.
“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 console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later.”
This wasn’t an official prediction though as his thoughts are that it will likely be Sony, but either of the 3 main competitors could jump the gun.
Another interesting section in the video discusses cloud computing and the future potential of that technology. More on cloud computing can be found later on in this article.
A while back we also wrote an article called Will the PS4 have an Optical disk drive? which gained a number of comments of people both agreeing and disagreeing. Carmack’s thoughts on this question is that at least one of the major players will be dropping the optical drive to follow the paths of the mobile “app stores” that have been doing very well this last year. We have no idea if that will be the PS4, the XBox 720 or the Wii 2 and I suspect if anybody will do it then it will be Nintendo as they like to do different things.
Other predictions are that the next-gen of consoles will require at least 2GB of internal RAM to cope with the demands of how much data will be shifting round the console to achieve the gameplay, graphics etc…
Back to cloud computing…
“Certainly the easier aspect of that is ‘net as storage’ where it’s all digital distribution and you could wind up doing an idTech 5-like thing… and blow it up to World of Warcraft size so you need a hundred petabytes of storage in your central game system. We can do that now! It’s not an absurd thing to talk about. Games are already in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of budget size and that’s probably going to continue to climb there. The idea of putting millions of dollars into higher-sized storage… it’s not unreasonable to at least consider.”
Finally there was some talk over cross-generational gaming which could fall in line with what we spoke about on forward compatibility a few months back.
What the video as it’s full of great information about where next-gen consoles could be heading.
Details via GamesIndustry and Guardian
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This is quite interesting indeed. I also still believe about the possibility of removing the optical disk drive. Sony have just done it for the PSP. Sure the games are smaller on PSP, but it shows that Sony are thinking this is the way forward.
I agree that they could easily go this route too. If there are some without a decent internet connection then perhaps taking a memory stick to a local shop and downloading the game at the shop is another option. Sony recently mentioned they could be making 2TB Memory Sticks in the next few years so storage wise, there really is nothing to worry about there.
probably the optical disk drive will be removed for the ps4 but for the 720 no way!
maybe the games would be on 1tb flash drive or just adding chips to the ps4 and any game you want to play would be chosen from the screen, no removing and inserting disks anymore
the 360 didnt even include blu-ray drives, wi-fi internet or bluetooth wtf? so definitely there not moving the optical disks for the 720!
sony knows exactly how their sales are gonna be so they might remove the drives or just keep it! and the price is not gonna be over $1000
image SONY adding a smelling sensation??!!!
xBox 9000 will be out late 2010… John is out of the loop..