The Playstation 4.5 may have missed a great opportunity, if the rumors are true. According to various rumors, Playstation 4.5 Blu Ray will not be a feature, despite Blu Ray being a feature of both the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One.
Rumors that Playstation 4.5 Blu Ray functionality won’t be a feature in the actual console is even more galling because Blu Ray is capable of supporting 4K, which the Playstation 4.5 will run on natively.
Playstation does appear to have its reasons though; having Playstation 4.5 Blu Ray functionality would drive up the cost of the console; even the standalone Playstation 4.5 will already cost several hundred dollars.
The Playstation 4 has already had a somewhat spotty record with Blu Ray: when the console first came out, the Playstation 4 required an update for you to play Blu Ray that it didn’t have out of the box.
Adding this to the rather intrusive footage-capturing rules that kept Let’s Players from being able to record any game footage on the console without the use of third-party software, the Playstation 4 may be focusing more on games than a multimedia platform than the Xbox One.
We won’t really know very many details about the Playstation 4.5 until E3 this year at their conference, so nothing is confirmed yet, and whether Playstation 4.5 Blu Ray will even be available for the console at first also remains to be seen.
The Playstation 4.5 will also be fairly bare-bones for a so-called “upgraded” console. It won’t have any games that are specifically for it, and the development team is having to take shortcuts in order to make the 4K viable on the console.
Phil Spencer of Microsoft has also said that Microsoft has no plans to follow Sony with anything resembling an “Xbox One 1.5”, instead focusing on improving the console’s hardware rather than its graphics card.
