pinner62, while your skillfully crafted posts leave little doubt in my mind that you are a sophisticated technology consumer, I don't think you fully understand the importance of input device standardization.
Back in the 80's, even though other computers did have a windows style GUI, the Mac just ran better. The primary reason for this was that it shipped with a mouse, and it was standard. Sure, you could get a mouse for the PC, but most software applications either didn't support it, or only supported the concept of a mouse as a afterthought. It wasn't until
much later that the mouse provided a good user experience on the PC.
Even if the camera for the PS4 was as capable as the Kinect, the fact is that hardly anyone has one. Therefore it's unlikely that we'll see software that really leverages the camera on the PS4. Developers will spend their resources elsewhere. I think the PS4's camera will be like the Move for the PS3. It will be largely ignored.
I can see where Sony is coming from. The Kinect style user input hasn't really proven itself yet. It only seems to excel for certain categories of games (fitness, dancing, and some kids games) and whether there will be some UI breakthroughs using it over the next couple years is a open question. Sony took the less risky path.
That said, as someone who doesn't play many games on a console (I have a gaming PC that is faster than a PS4 and Xbox One put together) I think I would probably buy a Xbox One over a PS4 because with all the voice commands it has the potential to be a much cooler TV watching device. There is something futuristic about natural language input that I really dig, I find myself using Siri and voice commands on Android more and more often. It's definitely the future.
dezzpayne said:
What I mean that is supposedly they will have a subscription service for the games in the cloud. Will PS1+PS2 games be separated as a different service entirely or will PS1+PS2 games show up in Playstation Now and the only difference is in the backend, eg PS3 games stream, PS1+PS2 games install locally?
I remember during the Xbox One "disc" controversy, one of the features that Microsoft was hinting at was a Netflix-style game service. I think this has massive potential, and I think it would be wise for Sony to set something like this up. While old games may have be fun or have a interesting story, I'd bet that when people buy the latest gen console, they really cut back on buying games for the previous gen console.
While we're talking about playing PS1, PS2 and PS3 games via streaming on PS Now, if you're going to stream the games anyway why not play games in the cloud where the computer in the cloud is more capable than the hardware that you're using. For example, instead of wiring up some PS3s, why not wire up some high-end PC hardware and play games that the PS4 wouldn't be capable of playing? Why not let people play PS4 games on their PS3? Now that would be much more interesting than mere the backwards compatibility story if the gamer doesn't actually need to keep upgrading his hardware to play the latest games.