Sony’s E3 press conference started a full six hours after Microsoft’s ended, plenty of time for everyone to digest the Xbox One’s $499 pricetag, glut of AAA games, and sparse utilization of Kinect and SmartGlass. Now Sony gets the last word, a chance to explain why the PlayStation 4 won’t repeat the mistakes of the PlayStation 3, a chance to explain why this time it has figured it out. It’s a full on console war from here on out, and this was Sony’s best chance to prove it can win it.
Of course, first it had to show what the PlayStation 4 actually is. At Sony’s initial PS4 announcement in February, the games, capabilities, and controllers for the system were heavily emphasized, but we didn’t see the box itself.
Now it’s all out on the table: a $399 pricetag, a sexy, slim box, and… video games that you own. It’s not rocket science, but Sony appears to get it this gen around. The company has yet to show anything that implies it competes with the Xbox One as an home entertainment system, but it seems to get video games.
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Of course, no matter how we try to hype ourselves on the moment the console is unveiled, in the end it’s just a box. The PS4 looks like a cross between the Xbox One and an early-gen PS2, but its real achievement is that it packs slightly superior power to the Xbox One into a seemingly much thinner package.
All Sony really had to do this year at E3 is say “$399,” drop the mic, and walk off the stage. And that’s essentially what it did. After forcing us to sit through two hours of gameplay videos, Sony delivered the $100 undercut to Microsoft’s $499 Xbox One and shut down the presentation to huge applause. Unfortunately, Sony didn’t clarify the launch date beyond the “holiday” time frame we’d heard earlier.
Sony took a direct shot at Microsoft’s much-maligned restrictions, running through them one by one and shooting each down in turn. The “PlayStation 4 won’t impose any new restrictions on used games,” disc-based games won’t require you to check-in online, and the console itself “won’t stop working if you haven’t authenticated within 24 hours.” The announcement was met with enormous applause by the audience, and delivered with a wicked grin by Sony’s Jack Tretton.
Sony’s new Gaikai-powered game streaming won’t be available right at the PS4’s launch. Instead it will land in 2014, at which point you’ll be able to stream any PS4 or Vita game directly to your console, as well as “select” classic PS3 titles. It’s not the PS3 backward compatibility fix people were hoping for, but it’s Sony so we’ll take all the backward compatibility we can get.
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