8 Disastrous Console Upgrades The PS4.5 Must Learn From

You can easily forgive Nintendo for this painfully unsexy floppy drive add-on for the Famicom/NES. There was no blueprint for the company to follow. In the NES, it had created a console that revived the games industry and outshone everything that came before. How were they to know that console upgrades were a terrible idea?

The idea was that the 'Disk Cards' for the system were to replace standard cartridges, offering high storage capacity, the ability to save games, and the ability to host great games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania. In Japan, you could even take blank disk cards to 'Disk System Kiosks', and pay to get games written onto them, which you could later overwrite with other games!

It was kind of revolutionary and started off well, but in the end many of its perks - such as saving and increased capacity - arrived on standard Nintendo cartridges, which were also more durable that Disk Cards. The Disk System went out of fashion and never made it outside of Japan, with Nintendo returning to good old-fashioned, 'blow in the slit' cartridges, and the best Disk System games coming to the standard NES.

What the PS4.5 can learn:

Make sure there are enough long-term perks to the console so that it's actually better value than its predecessor. Is a 4K resolution really enough to make the jump worth it? Will the extra power in the console make it capable of running games at 1080p at better frame-rates?