What 2013 Holds for the Gaming Industry.

by Hugh Summers

I’m sure many people in today’s society dismiss the gaming industry as a petty pastime or simply a childish form of entertainment. I completely disagree; in today’s society, the gaming industry provides not only entertainment and economic values, but it fabricates a basis for social interaction. Of course, one can argue that much of this interaction is via the internet, but in theory it helps you to get to know new people. Yet this argue is more about the progression of gaming in terms of technology rather that sociology.

As many gamers may know, 2012 was a significant year for gaming as PC gaming excelled, benefitting Valve Corp. greatly. Valve created Steam, a platform for purchasing and running PC games. Nowadays, people are beginning to move onto PCs, me being one of them; this is due to the graphical advantages of PCs over the outdated Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Yet this is where the significance of 2013 comes in; the concept new consoles have been released.

On the 20th of February, Sony provided the media and, later, the public, a glimpse at the PlayStation 4. Known as “Orbis”, Sony showed us the technological specs of the console which seem pretty good for something which is guessed to be sold at around the £400 mark. Yet after all the presentations for their new games, we never actually got to see the console, most likely due to the fact that Sony has been rushed ever since rumours of the console were released. From a business perspective it is easy to see why; it is important to keep momentum yet this is why, in my opinion, Sony revealed the console far too soon. Microsoft appear to be waiting until the E3 gaming convention in the summer to show us the new Xbox, a far better approach; by doing this they really do have momentum on their side. After the presentation of the Xbox, it will only be a matter of months before its release, ensuring that at its release, the new Xbox will be at the peak of public attention.

Anyway, here are the specs for Sony’s new PlayStation: 

I know that to many of you, this will all seem like technological mumbo jumbo, so let me defragment this for you.

The specs are quite poorly worded and are in theory, trying sound better than they actually are. An eight core processor is good, yet there are now smart phones which contain an eight core processor (of course they are of a much lower power) so from the start we can see there is nothing amazingly revolutionary here. Yet the specs are in generally, pretty good; it contains DDR5 Ram, a very fast and efficient upgrade from your standard DDR5 but again, nothing revolutionary. Once again though, the graphics card is simply referred to as “AMD next generation Radeon based graphics engine” which really provides no real insight into how powerful this machine is.

I’m sure the PS4 will be very impressive on release, yet currently, many computers still possess better gaming capabilities than this. I predict that within a year, it will be obsolete, much like the Xbox will be. I know this all seems very biased, yet I do own a console as well as a computer and I would have to say that I’d take a good gaming desktop over a console any day; for one, you can continuously upgrade a computer. Yet gaming desktops are pricey, so these consoles are brilliant value for their specs.

So, if you are an avid gamer yet are a little short on cash, buy a console and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed (even if Orbis won’t even support Sony’s new 4K TV’s!).