According to PlayStation head Andrew House, the PlayStation 4 Pro will not have a 4K Blu-Ray player because of a lack of consumer demand. House explained Sony’s thinking to the Guardian in an interview.
“Our feeling is that while physical media continues to be a big part of the games business, we see a trend on video towards streaming,” House said. “Certainly with our user base, it’s the second biggest use case for people’s time on the system so we place more emphasis on that area.”
The Blu-Ray drive in the PS4 Pro is a standard Blu-Ray player. Firmware updates will not add 4K functionality to it, House confirmed.
Even though the PlayStation 4 Pro won’t play 4K Blu-Ray discs, it will support 4K content via streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube. It will also support 4K gaming with HDR, although it will not support native 4K in most cases. With games, most will be rendered at 1080p and upscaled to 4K.
Microsoft recently released the Xbox One S, a mid-cycle refresh for the Xbox One. The Xbox One S includes a 4K Blu-Ray player and support for HDR content. It also supports 4K video streaming via Netflix and YouTube.
The November 10th release of the PS4 Pro signals a new shift in the way console generations are handled. Normally, a console generation lasts five to seven years before new hardware is released. According to House, the mid-generation refresh was brought about due to the loss of players to the PC market.
“I saw some data that really influenced me,” he said. “It suggested that there’s a dip mid-console lifecycle where the players who want the very best graphical experience will start to migrate to PC, because that’s obviously where it’s to be had. We wanted to keep those people within our eco-system by giving them the very best and very highest [performance quality].”
When asked if there would be more iterations of the PS4, House didn’t specify but also didn’t rule it out.
“I think that since this is our first foray into this kind of mid-cycle innovation, it’s far too early to call that,” he said. “We think that for a really substantial period of time this is the PlayStation 4 lineup.” He then continued, “We’re 40 million units into this lifecycle. Our declared goal is to be a further 20 million units above that by the end of next year. At that point we’ve got a pretty good sense of where the momentum of the lifecycle is.”
