At a Develop conference attended by Eurogamer, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House has spoken of the "sleepless nights" he had as the company tried to balance the PlayStation 4's technical specifications with a price point which would appeal to consumers.
Noting that much of the planning process that went into designing the PS4 was inspired by the problems endured during the PS3 years, House said:
"Sometimes these priorities were almost in conflict with each other. We absolutely wanted to build a platform with strong momentum out of the gate and that, from my point of view, necessitated a certain hardware price point and value proposition that could be more than just a niche market from the get-go."
As this was going on, Mark Cerny, the PS4's lead system architect, who was also in attendance, was touring studios with a view to improving on the "bitter and painful experiences on PlayStation 3," House said, presumably referring to the notoriously difficult CELL processor.
Ultimately however, "We had to make a call and it was another sleepless one for me. I essentially put a bet that if we went out there with this and made a strong financial commitment upfront, there would be other ways to offset and mitigate that. First and foremost that was ease of development and great experiences, and we would manage the financial implications in some way."
Sony considered launching the PS4 without a hard drive to keep costs down and the decision to include one was extremely expensive. Cerny said:
"Hard drives are expensive, and it's not like you can put half a hard drive in a console. The alternative is flash but you can't put much flash memory in it. We went through all the pluses and minuses – many minuses – of not having a hard drive… the conclusion was we needed to include one and it cost a billion dollars."
In the early days of the PS4's creation, Sony debated whether to feature two or four gigabytes of RAM. They finally settled on eight which again, was "very expensive".
Despite this, Sony announced in May that every PS4 sold makes a profit which is very unusual so early in the console cycle. The decisions made while designing the PS4 have paid off, as Sony has sold over seven million consoles since launch and the system has the highest number of developers working on games for it compared to other home consoles.
