It should come as no surprise that the PS4 is killing it in the popularity contest, between the way they kind of handed Microsoft their asses by NOT implementing tight-fisted DRM, but by also announcing the price of the console to be a whopping Benjamin less. While Microsoft has since eaten their own words regarding a lot of the controversial policies (that being a very generous way of putting it), they still are sticking with their original price point. Most people speculate due to the necessity of the much-anguished Kinect hardware, with further evidence to support this fact being given by none other than their competitor, Sony.
In an article by the good folks over at IGN, it’s explained that the PS4′s camera was more than likely cut in order to give the PS4 an edge in pricing, the inclusion of which would have likely seen the console match its competitor’s costs. Strangely enough, the camera itself will now be sold separately for $60, which makes me wonder where the other $40 would have come from. While I’m excited about the low price, and this whole experience has the smell of Sony learning from its mistakes about pushing too much tech (driving the price of their hardware up, with little to no early software to justify the purchase of said software *cough*Vita*cough*). But it also reminds this journalist (haha, I call myself a ‘journalist’) of Sony’s more recent paradigm shift into the world of selling the base tech for less, but selling mandatory parts of it separately. Again, simply looking at the Vita, we can see that, at a base price of $250, you were still all but required to buy a proprietary memory card, which still have not even remotely gone down in price. Granted, you could get away with not buying a memory card for your Vita, you know, if you didn’t want to bother saving your games or anything.
While I do doubt that many PS4 titles will require, much less even support the Move-esque functionality of the Dualshock4, I wouldn’t put it past Sony to include some unnecessary wagglan in some of their first party games. You know, things that aren’t really necessary by any means for the game to function, but has important functions needlessly relegated to the motion functions for the sake of requiring the $60 accessory. In the process, breaking and or ruining the game in the process. However, we won’t know until it does, or does not, happen. Until then, I’ll keep my fingers crossed, and hope Sony doesn’t attempt to only sell us part of a console.