Mark Cerny says PS4 is strong enough to “wow” people, best experiences still 3-4 years away

“We set our target at 10 times the PlayStation 3′s performance, because that’s what we felt we needed to achieve in order to differentiate the titles. When I did pitches to developers about the hardware, I talked about what I call the Akihabara test.”

“Akihabara is a electronics district in Tokyo, it’s just full of stores where you can buy just about anything you plug into a wall socket. I knew that at some point, there’d be out on the sidewalk a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and they might even be showing the same game, and the PlayStation 4 had to be powerful enough that when people walked by, they had to look at the PlayStation 4 and say, ‘Wow, I have to have that.’

“I believe we are at that level of performance. I mean, the million pre-orders we have is, I think, speaking to that.”

– PS4 designer Mark Cerny

Cerny went on to talk about much more, including how easy it is for developers to begin a game on PS4 due to its “unified memory” architecture, but he also warned us that what we see at launch may not be representative of what we get towards the end of the system’s life. “I think that really will play into the graphical quality and the level of interaction in the worlds in, say, year three or year four of the console.” he said.

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