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David Ewalt: I’ll start with the question everybody’s asking: When do we actually get to see the console?

PlayStation Chief Jack Tretton: You know, that’s really interesting. I’ve heard that from multiple reporters and shame on me that I didn’t see that as a big issue. :what: They’ll see it soon enough. I’m real proud of the fact that we’re talking about [launching in] holiday 2013 and we’ve already got a lot of detail out there, and a lot of game play, in February. But I was so focused on the content that when I think of the console I think of what comes through the screen, not the device that it emanates from. I just think there’s a lot of natural curiosity: What’s the controller gonna look like? What’s the box gonna look like? We made a conscious decision that wasn’t going to be a part of the first reveal, but I would look for E3 as a time when you’ll get a good look at it. Or sooner.

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So now that there’s this whole media infrastructure built around PlayStation, at what point do those services start to spill into the rest of Sony’s business? Microsoft’s built Xbox Music into Windows 8, it’s on PCs, it’s on tablets and phones…

I don’t think you’ll see PlayStation branded stuff on other Sony devices –you will see and you currently see the Sony Entertainment Network. Whether it’s your smart phone or your tablet or your TV you can take advantage of Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited… most of the deals that we’re doing with app providers we’re making available across the Sony Entertainment Network. So it’s not just Hulu Plus for your PlayStation 3. It’s Hulu Plus for your Sony device, if you’re a member of the Sony Entertainment Network.

I think you’re already seeing a proliferation like that, but it’ll be done under the Sony banner as opposed to the PlayStation brand. Because when we think PlayStation we think gaming. So if it’s somewhere that gaming lives, the PlayStation brand will probably come with it. If it’s pure entertainment then that’s really more of the Sony brand.

How much are you worried about the rise of mobile gaming taking away from your business? If someone does all their gaming on a phone now, doesn’t that mean they’re out of the market for a PlayStation 4?

As I’ve said, I’ve been around this industry for a long time. I’ve been in it since March of 1986, and when I got in it I was told that I was entering a business that was a toy for boys 12 to 17 years old, and was going away, and was gonna evolve into something else. So I’ve at least been in it long enough to see gaming be recognized as mainstream entertainment, gaming be recognized as not something that’s just for 12 to 17 year old boys, that’s now got an average age of 35, and has got a female audience that’s almost as large as the male audience. It is 2 billion people worldwide, mainstream entertainment. So I think the opportunity for dedicated game devices is better than it’s ever been before.

I use a Blackberry it’s because it’s got a good keyboard for sending and receiving emails, and I can make phone calls on it. But it’s really not that great of a phone in my opinion. I bought the Blackberry for email. And if I buy a PC, in some instances people buy it for gaming but I think in most instances they have it in a home office and they’re using it for multiple purposes, and gaming isn’t first and foremost. When somebody buys a PlayStation or one of our dedicated devices, they’re buying it first and foremost for gaming. And I will stack our gaming capabilities against anybody else’s.

So if you’re a true gamer you may kill some time on a smart phone and you may enjoy games –and I’m not belittling games on a smart phone– but you’re not gonna confuse Uncharted on the PlayStation 3 with an experience that you get on the smart phone. It’s a way to get people away from the intimidation factor of gaming, and making people realize that you can have a lot of fun with interactive entertainment. And if you get hooked I think you’re potentially a new PlayStation consumer.

So I think the gamer is alive and well and healthier than they’ve ever been. And I really don’t see smart phones and tablets as a threat, I see them as being additive. I think more people are gonna migrate to console from smart phone and tablet than the other direction.

How much of a threat is PC gaming to the PlayStation 4?

Well, when I started in the industry I was working for Activision, and they were created to create entertainment software for the PC. And when the Atari 2600 came along, they said ‘oh, here’s a diversion, let’s do this dedicated box, but ultimately we’re about PC software.’ So PC gaming has been around since Pong and I think it will continue to be around, but I just think there’s a fundamental difference between the experience you have in front of a big screen TV in the living room on a dedicated console, and the experience that the average consumer has.

The threat, if you will, of PC gaming has always been there. And I think for the amount of money that you’ve gotta pay, $250.00 for PlayStation 3, and the entertainment experience that you get, it’s hard to say ‘I’m a gamer but I just can’t justify spending $250.00 on that console, everything I need is on my PC.’

But part of your argument for the value of the console is that you have it on the TV screen. But now Valve’s got “big picture mode” in Steam, and soon they’ll have the Steam Box. Do you see that encroachment as a threat?

Again, if you look back in time, Sega was a very formidable competitor and a fine hardware manufacturer, state of the art in the 80’s and 90’s. And they’re no longer in the hardware business. Microsoft is doing a wonderful job and Nintendo’s done a wonderful job since the 80’s. But I think new players are gonna come in and old players may leave. There’s always gonna be competition. There’s always gonna be people taking bites of the apples. But I’ve always said a rising tide lifts all boats. And if people are driven to gaming then that creates more opportunity for PlayStation. If people are all of the sudden drifting away from gaming in any way shape or form, that’s a bigger threat than a dedicated system coming from another manufacturer.

When the PS3 came out, one of the things that really helped it sell was the built-in Blu-ray player –even if a consumer wasn’t going to game much, they could justify the purchase because it would also allow them to watch HD movies. What’s the Blu-ray player for the PS4? What will make people say, “this isn’t just for games, I need this?”

Well, it’s all there. It’s the ability to stream your Netflix and your Hulu and your MLB.TV and your NHL and your NFL Sunday Ticket. It’s the ability to get Video Unlimited and Music Unlimited and the ability to have a Blu Ray Player built into it, and to stream any form of digital or disc based entertainment. I still think that’s a very big part of the equation. But I don’t think the future of PlayStation 4 and our success is gonna be determined by selling it as a non-game device.

But all that stuff you’re talking about, like streaming movies and playing Blu Ray discs, I can do that on the PS3. Is there some entertainment feature I can only get on the PS4 that gives me a reason to upgrade?

You know, something that we have subscribed to since PlayStation 1 is that consumers come into the market at different price points, at different times, for different reasons. PlayStation 3 is gonna live on, and we don’t expect everybody to drop their PlayStation 3 and immediately buy a PlayStation 4 this Christmas. We know that there are gonna be people buying and playing PlayStation 3 for years to come, just as they did with PlayStation 2, just as they did with PlayStation 1.

There may be a consumer that doesn’t become a PlayStation 4 consumer for five years. That’s okay. I mean, we’re selling PlayStation 3’s to people today, we sold them to people in 2006, and we hope to be selling them to people in 2015. That’s okay.

I think the great thing is that there are no absolutes. It’s not all about disc space, it’s not all about internet connected, it’s not all streaming, it’s not all large form games… there’s a lot of choice there for consumers, and I would argue more choice than any of our competitors.

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PlayStation 4 Won't Support 4K Games, 3D 'Not a Focus'

Company moves away from stereoscopic gaming.

by Scott Lowe
February 21, 2013

Despite Sony's business-wide emphasis on 3D technology in the last two years, it chose to instead focus on 4K at CES this past January, making only brief mentions of the stereoscopic capabilities of its new products. Now, it seems that same philosophy is extending to the PlayStation 4. According to PlayStation Executive Shuhei Yoshida, the PlayStation 4 will support 4K video and photos, but 3D functionality will not be a focus.

"The PS4 supports 4K output, but only for photos and videos — not games," Yoshida said. "PS4 games do not work on 4K." While it's possible that we may see tech demos that demonstrate the system's capacity for 4K gaming, like Polyphony Digital's multi-display demos powered by several PS3s paired together, Yoshida says a single console cannot natively run games in the high-resolution format.

What's more, he said that stereoscopic 3D is not a focus for the new system, although it is 3D-capable.

"It's not a focus. But it does do it better. The basic capability is higher so more games will run at 1080p at 60 frames so it's an easier and better experience when you watch on 3D TV."

He went on to provide background about Sony's new strategy when it comes to 3D.

"3D was a big thing a couple of years ago — we made it a big thing because it was lead by the consumer electronics side of Sony and we liked what we could do on PS3 using 3D stereoscopic," Yoshida said. "But now the consumer electronics side of Sony, or all of the companies have shifted focus from 3D TV to something else, so if they're not talking about it, why would we?"

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AMD opens up about the PlayStation 4's custom processor

Trading off some of the PlayStation 4 almost-reveal limelight from Sony yesterday, AMD has shed a little more light on the custom processing unit that it has designed for the upcoming console.

Campbell Simpson | Monday, February 25 2013

Trading off some of the PlayStation 4 almost-reveal limelight from Sony yesterday, AMD has shed a little more light on the custom processing unit that it has designed for the upcoming console.

In an email to members of AMD's mailing list, the company has announced its "major design win": the partnership that will see Sony's PlayStation 4 powered entirely by AMD components. According to AMD's "Allow Me To Elaborate" blog post, the PlayStation 4 will run a single-chip setup developed by AMD in coordination with Sony.
The post, authored by AMD VP of Global Communications and Industry Marketing John Taylor, talks in broad terms about the technology that will power the PlayStation 4. Taylor has previously written about AMD's 2012 and 2013 client roadmap, referring to a 'Kabini' processor family which largely lines up with Sony's announced specs for the PlayStation 4.

The "semi-custom AMD APU" (accelerated processing unit) in the PS4 will combine eight general-purpose x86-64 central processing unit (CPU) cores with a graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as incorporating various integrated extras like memory controllers, video output drivers, and so on.

"Our semi-custom solutions take the same treasure trove of graphics, compute and multi-media IP found in our APUs, and customize them for customers who have a very specific high-volume product that could benefit from AMD's leading-edge technologies."

The CPU segment of the PS4's APU will rely on AMD's low-power 'Jaguar' processing cores, which incorporate a wide range of technologies not previously found in AMD processors. One area of advancement that will be of huge value to the PlayStation is Jaguar's ability to shut off power to cores that are not being utilised, lowering power consumption and energy (heat) production. Outright performance will likely be inferior to a high-end AMD or Intel desktop CPU from the 2013 line-up, but the appeal of the PS4 is a tightly-controlled specification that allows for far more coding optimisation than the varied PC market allows.

The GPU segment of the PS4's APU is being kept under tighter wraps. The only detail is the graphics processor's "nearly 2 teraflops" (instructions per second) of performance. Taylor shared that the chipset will be from AMD's "next-generation" family of Radeon graphics silicon -- almost certainly built on the 8000-Series "Southern Islands" desktop or "Sea Islands" mobile architectures, using a 28nm fabrication process. Performance will be superior to a desktop Radeon HD 7850 graphics chipset. It's likely the entire APU will be fabricated by TSMC, according to ExtremeTech.

"In the case of the PS4, we leveraged the building blocks of our 2013 product roadmap - the same technologies you find in the latest AMD APUs powering PCs, ultrathin notebooks and tablets -- to create a solution that incorporates our upcoming, low-power AMD "Jaguar" CPU cores with next-generation AMD Radeon™ graphics delivering nearly 2 TFLOPS of compute performance! "

The use of x86-based processing architecture in the PS4 makes the process of developing a game and writing code far closer to developing for a traditional Windows PC (or modern Mac), where the PlayStation 3 used a six-core Cell processor -- based largely on the now-niche PowerPC architecture, which powered Macs up until 2006 but is now almost exclusively reserved for IBM's UNIX servers. The Xbox 360 also used an IBM-designed PowerPC triple-core variant

Writing for the specialised Cell processor requires more development time than for x86, with the possibility of introducing coding errors that do not exist on other platforms. The PlayStation 4 will theoretically make it far easier for developers to port games from PC or Mac to Sony's platform and vice versa. This perception is reinforced by Sony's push to attract independent game developers to its self-publishing platform for the PS4.

"This unique APU architecture enables game developers to easily harness the power of parallel processing to fundamentally change the console gaming experience. Not only creating the opportunity for new possibilities in software design, but also faster and more fluid graphics.

More details about the AMD 2013 APU line-up, and likely the PlayStation 4's confirmed system specifications, will be released during the Game Developers' Conference in March.

"This is going to be a very exciting year for gamers, especially for those with AMD hardware in their PCs and consoles, as we have even more game-changing (pun intended) announcements still to come.

Look for some more exciting things happening at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March when we will provide even more info on how we are working with game developers to make AMD the hardware of choice for running the best games!"

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PlayStation 4 announcement stream drew 8 million viewers, 1 million concurrent peak

By Ben Gilbert posted Feb 27th, 2013 at 1:54 PM 74

Ustream viewers were really engaged by Sony's big PlayStation 4 hullaballoo last week -- around eight million folks tuned in to the live broadcast on Ustream, with a whopping 1 million concurrents at peak viewing. On average, said viewer watched the two hour and five minute press conference for one full hour. To put that in perspective, the average Ustream viewer in general watches a given broadcast for 20 minutes, effectively meaning the average PlayStation 4 event viewer tripled the norm.

Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable told Engadget that the numbers are emblematic of his company's worldwide infrastructure strength, and a good example of why Sony chose Ustream for sharing game footage and streaming on its next console, the PlayStation 4. "Game consoles are global in nature," Hunstable pointed out. "We need to be able to serve both, from broadcasting out of the console and to the viewers, on a global basis. To be able to do that, you need an infrastructure footprint that's on a massive scale. We're the only ones that have that."

The video streaming company boasts offices around the globe -- "two in the US, one in Europe, and two in Asia; 180 employees strong," Hunstable told us -- and it already has partnerships with a variety of media and electronics companies, from Viacom to Panasonic. Despite the PlayStation 4 partnership, Hunstable said Ustream's game console plans extend beyond a single next-gen box. "We're absolutely free to work with all partners. Our vision is to have Usteam be ubiquitous. We wanna power the world's live broadcasting. If that happens to be on a gaming console, which increasingly it is, we wanna have a place there." Of course, we've yet to hear Microsoft' next-gen plans, but it sounds like nothing's off the table for Ustream just yet. "There'll be a lot more coming for certain, not just about this announcement but all of the things that we have in store for gamers around the world," Hunstable teased.

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No delays expected: PlayStation 4 will return to ‘pick up and play’ style of old

Gamers will be able to play within seconds of touching the power button

Wednesday 27 February 2013

On the 21st of February 2013 the eighth generation of videogame home consoles became a reality. While it ostensibly entered into the gaming dialect with the release of the Wii U last November, the wait for Sony or Microsoft to unveil a truly next generation machine ended at the aptly named PlayStation Meeting 2013 a week ago and signaled the beginning of a new age of competition between the industry’s best and brightest. The smartly-codenamed Orbis became the PlayStation 4, an expected moniker, but one that furthers Sony’s dedication to a brand first established back in 1994 and that has since become synonymous with the ideals of hardware innovation, multimedia integration and diverse, contemporary software from developers at the forefront of the medium.

Of those three principles the PlayStation 4 exemplifies Sony’s implacable dedication to maintaining the latter two. Where the console stands in regard to the first is arguably still under question.

As a frenetic montage of blistering gameplay footage drew to a close a presentation that managed to remain genuinely engaging and compelling despite running over the two hour mark, the time for reflection came for those who had decided that 1am was a decent hour to finishing watching what was essentially an extended, if lavish, press release.

The event was, to my memory at least, possibly the least gaudy, corpulent major reveal of a home console within the annals of videogame history, and to me this was the most telling part of the whole experience. In hindsight, the PS4 doesn’t actually sound like a console of the future. It doesn’t sound like a utopian vision of an unachievable, empyrean hardware experience. To me, the PS4 sounds like a culmination of everything we accept that technology can do today, specifically designed to interact harmoniously with anything the industry’s most creative developers can envision.

The phrase “consumer centric and developer inspired” was repeated ad nauseum throughout the show, so much so that a drinking game involving the phrase could have reduced even those with the strongest constitutions to a paralytic mess.
Simplicity

Nevertheless, the mantra astutely sums up the aim and architecture of Sony’s invention. By packing in an Octa-Core CPU and a confirmed RAM of a whopping 8GB the PS4 is as close to mimicking the internal structure of a high end PC as home consoles have ever come.

This simplicity of design will, according to Sony, allow any developer to adapt quickly to the hardware in the short term, but will guarantee that, much like the PS3, developers will be able to get more out of the system as time goes by. We’ve been promised then that the potential is there for the future, but that the consumers of the here-and-now will also be well and truly catered for.

On the features front the console’s immediate relevance is anchored by its insistence on accommodating ‘the tablet age’ where instantaneous access, uploads and feedback are not just offered, but expected.

It’s here that the PS4 reminds me most of Sony’s latest smartphone the Xperia Z, a device that only the former Chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment and now President and CEO of Sony Corporation, Kaz Hirai, could have helped bring to market.

Like the Xperia Z, the PS4’s specific area of innovation is difficult to pinpoint, but the potential to excel in every existing area of functionality is present and accounted for. The PlayStation 4 seemingly has an answer to everything: continued Move support and the PS4 Eye for the ardent motion control advocates, improved Remote Play and the ability to integrate a smartphone or tablet as a second screen to keep up with the innovations of the Wii U and Xbox SmartGlass and an all-new Dualshock controller complete with a Vita-inspired touchpad and a share button which can upload gameplay footage at the touch of a button.

This is not a console that expects you to wait, with digital games available to play seconds after clicking the download button, instant streaming of gameplay via social networks and the promise that the time between pressing the power button and the actual play part encompassing seconds rather than minutes.
Quick start

None of the above is really breaking any new ground in isolation, but as a cluster they represent the pinnacle of instant satisfaction from a gaming device. Perhaps the individual innovations - not to mention the reveal of the dimensions and aesthetics of the actual unit itself - are being held back until the infinitely more chaotic gaming-bloodbath that is E3. For now though we have the controller, a mantra and a promise of quality gaming experiences, and on that final, all-important point, Sony excelled.

Whether it was the sea of change ushered in by PC giant Blizzard blasphemously advocating a closed gaming system for the first time by bringing Diablo III to Sony consoles, or the constant stream of support from studios Sony have quietly and caringly ushered into the big leagues like Guerrilla Games, Media Molecule and Sucker Punch Productions, the plethora of compelling continuations of PlayStation’s stalwart franchises and fresh new IP was indicative of the system’s potential to offer premium gameplay experiences.

While the pseudo-intellectual waffle of Jonathan Blow and David Cage brought an air of unwelcome pretentiousness to proceedings, their actual contributions of footage cemented the PlayStation brand’s commitment to offering a platform ripe for independent developers to break open the monopoly of triple-A gaming.

Cage’s presentation of his studio’s latest facial capture technology came close to being the highlight of the event as he showcased how the crevices and arches of an elderly man’s face could now subtly convey emotion and narrative. It was an impressive display of tech that finally suggested that in the near future the facial expressions of videogame characters could teeter away from the precipice of the uncanny valley – an animation hypothesis which holds dodgy human replicas produce feelings of revulsion in real human observers - rather than plunging head-first into it. Unfortunately for Cage there was more from Ubisoft, or to be more specific, more from Watch Dogs and with that the show was truly stolen.
Olden days

In essence, the PlayStation 4 appears to be a console made first and foremost for the modern videogame enthusiast, and the press conference - a predominantly void-of-fluff celebration of all that makes us pick up a controller in the first place - was surely enough to convince even the most jaded console owner to consider an upgrade when the time comes.

As the dust settled following the event, the omission of pricing details and European release date became the main topics of discussion. The encouraging promises that second hand games wouldn’t be locked out and that a lack of an internet connection wouldn’t render the console useless also came to light and while absorbing this news I found myself reminiscing about the days when a console, a cartridge, a controller and a power supply was all that was needed to ‘pick up and play’.

Thinking about it further I remembered that one particular new feature of the PS4 that allows you to get back into the game you were last playing in a space of seconds after pressing the power button. It seems that beneath all of the new ideas, the new technology and the new games, Sony might well have spent a lot of time thinking about those days too.

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PlayStation 4: how developers helped build the console of the future

Sony's first-party studios, together with Ubisoft chief Yves Guillemot, on how guidance was sought from game makers

Killzone: Shadowfall, the first confirmed PlayStation 4 launch title

The Cell processor must have seemed like a good idea at the time. A complex, proprietary setup, with a central PowerPC core and eight independent co-processors, it was powerful and multifaceted, but difficult for under-pressure studios to get to grips with. The major problem was, the design ran against the prevailing trends in PC architecture and, in an era of multiplatform development, this meant developers rarely got the chance to push it to the maximum.

Sony learned its lesson. Four years ago, when the company started R&D on the console's follow-up, a different approach was decided on. While Cell was an internally devised project, co-developed with IBM and then presented to the development community, PlayStation 4 would take a more democratic approach. Just as it did with the original Playstation in the early 90s, Sony would go on the road, and ask studios what they wanted. Or at least that's the story hinted at during the PS4 launch event last Wednesday.

But was that the reality? It seems so, according to Sony's first-party teams. "We've been very closely involved in the development of the machine," says Herman Hulst, the co-founder of Guerrilla Games. "We've had [PS4 system architect] Mark Cerny over several times. We got the entire group of core developers together and gave deep feedback on everything system-related. It's no longer designed in an Ivory tower somewhere in Tokyo, it's shared with us, with Naughty Dog, with Sony San Diego – and together we've built the machine. As Mark said at one point during the launch event, it's a console for gamers by gamers."

And it turns out developers were pushing for two things: tighter, more seamless social connectivity, and a design philosophy more in line with modern PC innards, so that teams immediately understood and could work with the hardware. "This platform is great to work on because of the PC-like architecture," confirms Hulst. "It's very easy for the engineers to get their heads around. We had the game up and running very early. We've now had two and a half years of development time, which was about what I'd want for a title of this scope – and the team size is about 150 people, it's only a little bigger than Killzone 3. We've invested a lot in tools, and in various clever ways of having more and more detailed assets, but tools are the key - we're getting smarter."

Killzone: Shadowfall game director Steven Ter Heide reckons that PS4's shift toward the PC, with its eight cores, AMD GPU and 8GB of memory, will lead to an accelerated rate of evolution – in other words, the gap between PS3 and PS4 games performance will widen much more quickly. "If you look at the transition between PlayStation 2 and PS3 and the launch titles on the latter machine, then look at the launch titles for PS4, I think you'll see a much more impressive leap in quality," he says. "I think the console and the ability for us to work with it has shown that we can make that leap much faster – we as developers are much closer to the insides of the thing."

For Ubisoft it seems, the concerns were more about game design, and about how Sony would need to shift focus to appeal to a more connected generation. "We were pushing for social," says its chief executive Yves Guillemot. "The features that exist today with the PC and smartphones, we wanted to make sure we could use those elements on the console. The PS4 lets you have friends watching and helping you in the game – you'll be able to have an experience that's more connected all of the time. When you have millions of people playing something, achieving things together, you can introduce meta games – some really interesting features.

"It will mean community games rather than playing games alone. When my children play, they always have their friends popping up on screen, and they're pushed out of their single-player campaigns because they want to play with friends. Now we have the possibility of merging multi- and single-player components. If your friend pops up you can play the single experience, but within that, your friends can help you progress."

Perhaps it's ambitions like this that inspired Sony to make its $380m bid for Gaikai, the cloud computing company whose technology is built into the PS4 infrastructure. It allows streaming access to game demos of course, but also (we're promised) more integral remote play connectivity with Vita – as well as the ability to take control of a friend's game, helping out if they're stuck. Seamless cross-platform communication with smartphone and tablet devices also seems to have been something Ubisoft was interested in – and something that Sony is set to deliver. Guillemot envisages a new era of collaborative gaming in which players draw non-gaming friends into specific group challenges. "You could have a game that requires certain resources, and to get them you have to perform actions that could only be achieved using smartphones or tablets," he says. "You could encourage friends to do these, and give them rewards on their own devices. It's an exchange.

"We could have big global meta games which require people with smartphone connections. You may have a game that requires language decryption so you could have specialists helping online – a whole community can work together. That's just an example, but many games could use communities in this way."

According to Matt Southerns of Evolution, developers have also been involved in the design of the peripherals, especially the new Dual Shock, with its new touchpad and LED light array. Evolution apparently pushed for more exact tilt controls, so now the pad functions well as a steering wheel. "One of the most positive parts of the development was the work on the controller," he says. "We all had a secret meeting after E3 last summer and shared our own prototypes, we called it our science fair! There was lots of very open feedback and constructive criticism from a wide variety of studios. That was important because it meant we could build a controller that was a design classic but also embraced a new age."

Steven Ter Heide talks about how Guerrilla's key concerns were the ergonomics – they suggested changes to the triggers, adding an outward curve for better tactile feel. "We also pushed for the headphone jack because we wanted to lower the threshold to multiplayer gaming," he says. "Everybody should be able to go online and chat. It ended up on there and it's awesome. These sounds like really simple features but it makes all the difference; and just those little tweaks to the indentations on the sticks – they're slightly raised so there's more positioning. It feels really nice."

Guillemot hints that, alongside Watchdogs, Ubisoft is preparing to announce an original IP for next-gen machines this year, probably at E3. "Each time a new console arrives, you have the possibility to come in with new creative ideas – so we will try to bring in those new ideas," he says. "You'll know more in the future. The goal is to take advantage of what those consoles bring."

This is vital. Both Sony and Microsoft have to produce hardware that will inspire developers as well as impress consumers: this is a much more complicated industry now; consoles are having to compete for development support with a whole host of devices – we're seeing a huge migration of small and mid-sized studios to PC and smartphone. They need to be seduced again – hence the consultation on architecture, and the placing of a developer, Mark Cerny, in a key position of power on the engineering side.

We as gamers should remain sceptical until the machine arrives but despite a downbeat press response to last week's event, positivity is emerging from the development community. "We have a double revolution," says Guillemot. "The revolution of graphics, AI and animation, but we also this huge social revolution, of making sure the game understands who the player is and what they want – a more personalised experience.

"This is the future. If we manage to combine these elements, the industry is back on track for the next ten years."

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