PS4 Reveal: What has Sony learnt from Microsoft?

On Wednesday Sony held a huge event and officially announced the PS4 (sort of). They were sparing with details but announced some key changes. Firstly, the PS4 would not support DualShock and their controller is a little different. They also announced some hardware specifications as well as some new social features of the system. There were the clear beginnings of an evolution of a console generation, part of that was Sony fixing the PS3’s shortcomings with ideas from Microsoft (as I prepare to be lynched by PlayStation fanboys).

"For Man Hands!" (not my words)

The biggest and most detailed part of the announcement was the new PS4 controller. The controller has taken several points from the 360 controller and although it hasn’t copied the 360 controller outright it has definitely been influenced by it. The PS3 controller was often described as “for small girlish hands” (not my words) and it appears Sony have reacted to this, the PS4 controller is much bulkier than the PS3 controller, part of this is due to the touch pad but it is generally bigger too. The two handles are thicker and more ergonomically shaped than before, they look as though they fit your hands a lot better. This is much like a 360 controller which is considerable bigger than a PS3 controller.

The shoulder buttons (that’s L/R1/2) no longer stick out of the top of the controller and instead are incorporated into the curved top of the controller, like with the Xbox. This should make it easier to wrap your fingers around the buttons. The triggers have also changed (thank God!). The PS3 triggers (L/R2) were one of the worst things ever created by humans. They were convex and were prone to not being pushed properly and fingers slipping off. How Sony could make such a terrible feature is beyond me. The triggers were so bad that when making Call of Duty, Infinity Ward had to switch the default fire and aim down sights (scope) buttons to R1 & L1 instead of R2 & L2 (like on Xbox) because they felt that players would become frustrated at not being able to be as accurate. There's even a big market for PS3 trigger grips, which make the triggers more like a 360 controller. The 360 has concave triggers which are not prone to slipping off as much, are more easily pressed and feel more like the triggers of a gun. In response Sony has drastically improved the triggers, making them straight, so in-between the PS3 and Xbox. The face-on shape of the triggers is also similar to the 360.

"Those triggers, I think I feel sick"

The thumbsticks have also changed. They now have outer ridges, drawing similarities from 360’s concave sticks. They are still parallel unlike on the 360, but the ridges mean there is less slipping of fingers like there was on the PS3. The ridges act like a concave pad, while retaining the convex pad of the original PS3 controller, so Sony have taken some from Xbox, but again they have stuck partly to their own guns and not totally ripped off the Xbox controller.

Off the controller now and there are a couple of other items which Sony has taken inspiration from their great rivals. The PS4 will ship with an included headset, like the 360 did, albeit it wasn’t a great one. Shipping with a free headset meant all Xbox users could speak to their friends and 12 year olds could trash talk and swear at the online community. Meanwhile, 12 year olds on PS3 had nowhere to voice their deeply intelligent arguments and political viewpoints, instead they’d have to buy or find a headphone and microphone system.

Aww, how polite

Sony has also revealed Playstation Eye, a Kinect like camera for the PS4. Sony has seen the huge amount of money Kinect made for Microsoft (even if no one ever used it after buying it). Though not terribly good for gaming on its own, Kinect has redeeming features. It has been well utilised as an addition to the gaming experience as oppose to the centre of it. Mass Effect 3 and FIFA 13 both have used Kinect to voice over tactical commands. Also, when using non-gaming features of the Xbox, Kinect is very useful. It allows you to navigate the 360, using its apps (like watching TV/BBC iPlayer/4OD etc) so you don’t have to do anything with a controller. You can tell your Xbox to pause or search for something you want to find, all without having to get up (as if TV couldn’t get lazier). Even though Kinect is reviled by hardcore gamers, casual gamers are attracted by it. Much like the Wii it allows new gamers to play games and makes a whole new market for the Xbox, one Sony never truly managed to capitalise on with the PS3. This is however something that the Wii hit the nail on the head with.

Sony has also mentioned that it will release a PlayStation app that will work similarly to the Wii U’s touchscreen controller. The app will display extra information in-game such as maps, among other features. This takes from Microsoft’s Smart Glass app which allows Xbox users to  use their phones as an input the Xbox’s menu, again so you don’t need a controller. Microsoft predicted that there was a future in incorporating phones and tablets into the console gaming experience and it seems that Sony seem to agree.

PS4 profiles will also have their own profile page. The page shares similarities with the profile screens on 360s. They show your trophies, games, recent activity etc. The page in itself is very similar to Xbox Live profiles, without the addition of avatars. However, in all honesty the profiles take more from Steam, the PS4 profiles appear to be an amalgamation of the two. Sony is incorporating a greater social element into their consoles, something the 360 has been slowly working with beacons that tell Facebook users you want to play a game (though not in a Jigsaw kind of way). No console has yet truly mastered social media integration. PS4’s share button on the controller suggest Sony are trying to do that.

The Xbox has several features over the PS3 and Sony appear to have attempted to rectify these with changes on the PS4. The 360 controller took heavy influence from the PS2 controller and was thus the best controller on the market. Sony chose not to update their controller and were left with something that was a little out-dated. People generally like the PS3 controller because they are used to it since everyone has a PS2. Xbox managed to win over a huge number of those PS2 owners with their controller. The PS4 controller has evolved and taken much from the 360 controller. Controller evolution goes from SNES to PS2 to Xbox 360 (to maybe PS4?) Xbox pulled it off this generation, there’s nothing to say Sony won’t do it this time. Sony has also taken features from Wii U and Steam which I briefly mentioned, so it’s not as if Xbox are perfect Kings of this generation. So when Microsoft possibly announces the next Xbox in April, we could be seeing many of PS3’s better features on the next Xbox. (Hopefully that'll stop me being lynched)

Could we see Advertising in Console Games?

Some say money makes the world go round, others say it’s love. In reality it’s probably advertising and marketing. Marketing makes people love products or brands which in turn makes people lots of money, so maybe all of the above statements are true (After all, it sure isn’t gravity that makes the world go round, what a ridiculous idea!). Advertising is all around us these days, TV, cinema, billboards, newspapers, even now spamming our phones in some kind of Orwellian plan to melt our brains. Games on our phones regularly feature advertising, but how close are we to a future where advertising invades that little box under our TVs.

If you have an Xbox, advertising has already invaded that little box. The Xbox dashboard is already littered with adverts, so much so that the “Play Game” button is not the biggest onscreen. As mentioned games on phones regularly contain adverts, these games are all free to play and one of the most popular ways for developers to claw some cash back when the game doesn’t cost a penny. Free to play is becoming more and more popular bet is yet to truly manifest itself on consoles. There are countless numbers of free to play games on the PC and many of them are good if not fantastic. Games like Planetside 2 are almost, if not totally, the quality of a standard retail game that you buy. This is a game that never forces you to pay for anything, nor does it punish you harshly for being frugal. If free to play continues to take off and does also hit consoles, there’s a good chance we could be seeing adverts.

So how do I actually play a game?

So why is free to play so appealing? This, in an industry where developers are scrimping around trying just to survive and whose entire business model can depend on the success of a single game. As I’ve mentioned often, gaming is not mainstream like TV or film, so developers need to make it so if they want to survive. They need to attract more individuals to the market or need to persuade those already in the market to be spending more, the former is the easier option. By making games free to play consumers have no worry about making an investment, if they don’t like the game, they get rid without any fuss. When buying a normal game it is a risk, you may read reviews and be recommended by others, but at the end of the day, you may disagree with everyone else and hate the game you just bought for £40. That’s money down the drain and money that you may not want to spend on a game for some time. 

The increasing number of free to play games and the success of Steam sales shows that gamers are becoming less and less willing to play a high price for a game. Steam sales regularly present games for under £10, often under £5 and sometimes under £3. And these are for big mainstream titles, over Christmas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution cost roughly £3 on Steam. The industry is moving further and further away from the big £40-£50 game and it will be interesting to see how the new generation of consoles prices their games.

I aint paying £40 for a game I can get for free, that's £2 an hour!

Adverts are often annoying and frustrating to watch, particularly when targeted poorly. Many of us would love to be rid of them, this is a large part of the success of the BBC. It has no adverts so that you are not disturbed and its one hour shows are actually an hour as oppose to forty minutes. The success of free games on app markets shows that people are very willing to invest in a free game, even if it has adverts. The fact that it is free overrules any annoyances people generally have with adverts, particularly when they are tucked away and don’t really bother us. This formula goes beyond the games industry however. Freeview on TV, the channels you don’t have to pay a subscription for, they run purely on the power of adverts, generating large incomes. By being free, they have a larger market and so advertisers pay more because more people are watching the channel and by extension the adverts put on it. Advertisers pay huge amounts for television adverts and hence many TV channels continue to run in this form, with new channels popping up. For example, MTV, which you have to pay for, have a free channel, VIVA, in order to try and get the best of both worlds. In the newspaper industry, free newspapers are just as profitable as standard ‘pay for’ newspapers, thousands upon thousands of free newspapers are given away free every day on the London Underground as commuters go to work. When they return they sometimes get free magazines which also are profitable businesses. The newspaper industry is struggling to compete with new digital media on phones and computers, so some, like the Evening Standard, have gone free in order to stay afloat.

In a recession-hit world, many people have less disposable income and so will gladly take up an opportunity to get something for free, even if you have to go through a pesky advert. However, the key is that the advert cannot bother them. Gamers must feel they are not losing the experience due to an advert, they must not be put off by it. The advantage of the game being free cannot be outweighed by how annoying the advert is. This means advertisers are walking a tight line when balancing noticeable and persuasive without being pushy and annoying. If the advert detracts from the game, the game doesn’t get played and no one wins, except the consumer, they haven’t lost a penny.

"Those times when you're just waiting for the match to start"

Advertisers will want to be more and more successful and so will push the boundaries more and more of what is an acceptable level of advertising. People are greedy and so will push very hard, sometimes at the detriment of the user experience, though if the media being used is incredibly popular, companies know they can be increasingly pushy. Look at YouTube for example. It started with not adverts at all (a long time ago) then came up small pop ups when you were watching a video. Then came big adverts on the YouTube homepage that took up huge amounts of space. Then came adverts before a video starts, but that you can skip after five seconds. Now, there are even 30 second long adverts before a video starts which you cannot skip. If your video is one minute thirty seconds long, then adverts could potentially make up a quarter of the two minutes you spend on that video! This succession is a distinct possibility for games. They may only be small popups in corners of screens now, but you may soon have to watch a full length advert just to play Angry Birds and further into the future you may be waiting to start a Halo match online, but all 16 players have to sit and watch an advert first.

It will probably be a long time before adverts hit console gaming, but it is still a distinct possibility. Several other industries have succumbed to the allure of marketers, others forced into it by the economy or a dynamic market. Before we see adverts two things have to happen. Free to play really has to take off, by having a significant market share compared to standard retail games. Marketers also have to work out how to best utilise the gaming industry for advertising. There is still time for both those to happen and advertising will inevitably reach gaming, just as it will everywhere. By 2084 adverts will probably be messaged into our brains as Big Brother decides what is best for us and what we should all be buying, but until then, we have Apple for that.