PS4 Neo is purely about keeping users on-side, House explains

4K? VR? The actual motivation behind Sony’s PS4 Neo may actually be more straightforward than you think.

That’s according to PlayStation boss Andrew House, at least, who has told The Guardian that the main thinking behind the upgrade is simply to keep people engaged with the PS4 platform for longer throughout its natural lifecycle.

We’ve traditionally seen that some of the core audience tends to gravitate back to high-end PCs at some point because these are the people who want the finest graphical performance,” he explained.

So here’s a great opportunity to have them stay within our ecosystem. If you are a person who’s just purchased a 4K television, maybe there’s not that much content around right now, so there’s something interesting about games being able to fill that gap and offer that experience. Those are the fundamentals of Neo.”

Note that House talks of PS4 still having a normal lifecycle. The exec even goes as far as to claim that the Neo does not represent a change to the established console lifecycle.

I don’t think we’re suggesting with Neo, the conventional console lifecycle is over – I’m certainly not making that statement,” he added. This is an additional option, it’s a high-end version of a PlayStation 4, let’s be very clear about that, rather than a generational shift.

I’m not suggesting we want to bring the games industry to an 18-month-two-year cycle because then you would lose an awful lot of the fixed platform benefits we’ve enjoyed that allow for these really great leaps in game experience.”