Sony Leaks: : Sony PS4 Successor, Not Neo, Fully Upgradeable

This story was just a false rumor and proved to be wrong. The latest PS4’s name is PS4 Pro.

Tomorrow is probably one of the bigger days in gaming after E3 and Gamescom this year, with news related to Sony’s latest consoles which will succeed the PS4- PS4 Slim and PS4 Neo. There are also going to be some game reveals as well, but this is about a leak of the PS4 Neo.

So this is a big one. There were a lot of rumors about the PS4 Neo or PS4K since the past few months and it seems that just before the day of reveal some images have been leaked regarding the console’s details. First of all-

The name of the next PS4 is PS4 Forever Edition

OK this has to be one of the most shocking things ever- Consoles going fully upgradeable. But let’s take a look at the list from top to bottom shall we:

1. Most Powerful System to Date- It is practically true, with Scorpio releasing some time in late 2017, PS4 Forever (Or whatever this will be called) will be the most powerful console till that time.
2. 4K Output, Games, Movies- Apart from games, this is probably very obvious since the Xbox One slim is able to play 4K movies, but games? That’ll be a wait & watch scenario.
3. Baked-in PS Plus- OK, now this point is a bit confusing. What does baked in mean? Will you get the service complimentary? And if you will get it free, will it have life long validity or some time limitation?
4. Console First SSD Out Of The Box- Now this is interesting. An SSD by default in all systems will drastically reduce the load times, but being too cost heavy, how much storage will be provided? A SSD is always a good thing anyways.
5. Fully Upgradeable Components- This is the most shocking of all news. You can replace a GPU, a HDD/SDD and can increase RAM. This is in many ways a good thing as well as a not so good aspect.

Let’s talk about that glaring 5th point. While upgradeable hardware is good in the way that a game can get higher frame rates and better visual fidelity if you have better hardware, the difficulty comes where the game developers used to build the games to the metal and hence could utilize the full power of a PS4, but now, if the above leaked image is true, it completely becomes a PC. Yes, the PS4 and Xbox One already are PCs with static hardware, but this upgradeable nature of consoles puts it in direct classifications as that of the PCs, hardware wise. This may not be a problem for first party developers of Sony like Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games, because they’ll have to make and optimize their game for limited variants of hardware. But for 3rd party developers like BioWare, Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red or any one of the thousands of developers, this will become an issue, since they already have to optimize for the thousands of PCs present in gamers’ houses. Now optimizing the for the PS4 Forever will cost them extra money and may not be as returning as just developing for one console.

But there is a twist- You’ll only be able to use PSGPUs, which I suppose will be the ones specifically designed for the PS4. SO basically you won’t be able to put a GTX 1070 or a GTX 1080 in there. Another aspect that I thought about is that- Notice that the upgradeable parts are mentioned as GPUs, HDD/SSD and RAMs, it’s not written in terms of etc. So does it mean that only these 3 parts will be upgradeable. If so, then that limits the amount of variation considerably, considering that the processor remains same. Also it means that the Power Supply that Sony will be able to sate the needs of the upgradeable and more power consuming GPUs.

Apart from that, the fact that they are going to implement discreet GPUs makes me think if they are getting rid of the APUs that have been powering the PS4 and Xbox One till now or will the discrete GPUs work along side an APU.

One last thing that comes to mind is- This console is the Forever Edition, emphasizing on the word ‘Edition’ here, does it mean that Neo will be there as a separate console or has Neo been replace by Forever? Now that is an interesting question.

There are a lot of questions right now and most of them will be answered tomorrow, but this is what I think of the rumored leaks. I could have talked more, but all that would be speculation and shooting arrows in a dark night, but the points that I have mentioned are worth pondering about (At least I think so). This is all a rumor for now, so I would highly recommend taking this with grain of salt. What do you guys think? If this is true, then are you in favour of it or would you prefer a static hardware but a 3 year console cycle? Let us know in the comments below.