As a veteran gamer, the ps4 is, in my opinion, the biggest epic fail of Sony to date. Now it's important to keep in mind that I am, or perhaps the better way to say it is, I was the biggest Playstation fan once upon a time. Until the Playstation 4 happened. The ps4 is both ahead of it's time, yet as behind as it can be all at the same time. Let us count the ways the ps4 fails...
First off the ps4 is so ahead of itself it can't even deliver the majority of it's features and services well, if at all. That's because the devs failed to remember that most internet connections are below 20gb/ps in the U.S. So frankly the features that rely on the "cloud" and fast internet connections just plain won't work for most players. Even for those who do have large and in charge internet connections, at least half or more of those gamers have a maximum bandwidth usage cap or they get charged extra or throttled to a point where it's faster to watch paint dry than download anything. This means some gamers won't be doing updates or if they do they will take days, even possibly months to download. Now I realize that millions of isp monopolies that exist in American counties that sell crappy speeds at obnoxious prices aren't Sony's fault, but Sony does have to remember that they have to sell a product for their main target customers in the USA. Japan and even China has by far better speeds at better prices than the USA.
Let's be real most are kids or young adults who live at home with parents who pay for the internet. If they are lucky enough to get a good connection at a good price, that's great but most local counties have horrible over priced internet packages that can't deliver the speed and consistency needed for such huge online aspirations as the "share play" feature. Even something as simple as downloading a game update has become a two-day task at the fastest. This brings me to the next reason ps4 is an epic fail....games are waaaaay too big and so are the updates. In fact the games have gotten so large that the ps4's hard drive can barely hold a single RPG MMO and it's updates without being completely full. This wouldn't be a problem IF the games were stored on the discs they came on, and updates or downloadable games were stored and played directly from "the cloud" but of course they are not. So let's weed whack through this in two parts. The fact that I own a disc of Elder Scrolls and yet the entire game has downloaded to my hard drive is inexcusable, this business model will not last long. The games are to large to be stored on individual hard drives unless Sony is prepared to offer affordable 500 TB hard drives in the new models. Sony is never going to beat the second hand market forcing people to download the entire disc to storage. As far as download versions and updates, I ask myself exactly what is the point of my PS Plus membership?? Why is the game and updates not store-able on the cloud? Oh yeah Sony is cheap. Now to be honest even if they did store it all on their servers the slow internet speed of the US would make most games crash, if they even started in the first place. So actually in the future discs are actually Sonys only realistic option to sell and delivery these ginormous games, as soon as they get a ps5 that actually doesn't store the entire game on the hard drive, and cheap 500 TB hard drives. Otherwise gaming in the US my be dead in the water.
So aside from those enormous issues we could talk about the fact the ps4 was unfinished when it came out, now a couple of those issues were finally fixed, like the ability to use a theme and change your profile picture. Meh seriously? Or we can talk about the horrible battery life of the ps4 dual-shock controller with it's bedazzling lights draining power all day. Or we can talk about the horror that is the mic that came with the system and the fact until recently there were no Bluetooth mics available for the system and the mics offered now are terrible as usual. We can go over how the system can't even download an update in rest mode unless you PAY for plus, so now our system itself is locked to upgrades and premium fees, BOOOOOOOO!!!!! We can go on an on about how crummy ps Plus is and how all it's free games are junk no one wants, or how the discounts mean nothing since I can get the games for half the price of what's listed in the PS Store, new at Walmart. I could have a roast at their expense of the broken chat system and how all I want is a delete ALL messages button!!! But I digress, I'm sure there is more important things to mention like it's intentional lack of backwards compatibility. Did they actually think I would buy that game a second time??? So at this point all in all, the ps4 is too big for it's breeches and incapable of delivering the desired services and features it intended to. It is basically a hunk of almost useless junk that can work and has decent graphics when it does but won't last long with this delivery and business model, oh and nobody actually likes micro-transactions, they are old news and wont sustain these games, the episodic and subscription based model won't hold on either, it's too expensive and people hate it.
Now the saddest fail of all is Sony's inability to get good variety of games and genres on it's system, lack of decent kids games, and the lack of multiplayer story modes that aren't only split-screen, and also lack of split screen enabled games has just made all these expensive "interactive online social" gaming features, totally useless! Ugh. Step up the game Sony or my next machine will be a Steam machine.
So there you have it the epic fail that is the ps4.