All of these options for prettier games are moot if gamers don’t buy the Pro or better 4K and HDR-ready TVs and could make all of this another failure of industry hype, like the push for 3D TVs and graphics a few years ago. Or it’ll be like the move from standard definition TVs to HD TVs, and millions will jump on board.
The other thing that could should short circuit these changes would be game developer apathy. Most gamers won’t have a Pro console or an expensive new TV, so designing games to support these new graphics options only makes sense if doing so isn’t too laborious. It sounds like it won’t be.
At the NYC event, Sony’s selection of developers made it sound like making sure games support HDR wouldn’t require a lot of additional work. Al Hastings, chief technology officer of frequent Sony developer Insomniac Studios estimated that it was only taking one “person-month” (the amount of labor it’d take one person to do in one month or, say, two people to do in half a month) to get the PS4's Ratchet & Clank game to support HDR. Naughty Dog’s Christian Gyrling said it took roughly twice that for his studio to prep the PS4's The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 to also support HDR. The games will get small patches of 100MB or so to enable that functionality, mostly using existing assets from the games. Both men said that new games built from the ground up to support the Pro and the base PS4 might require a little more work, but not an extensive amount.