You spoke too soon.
Any word on AAA price point? All I can find is this for PS4: If PS4 Games Only Cost $60, They're Actually Cheaper Than PS3 Games. Jack Tretton implies $60 price point .
[QUOTE=enomaj]
You spoke too soon.
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Well that’s surprising. I’m glad they kept things like Netflix free to use, though. I’m a PS+ subscriber, and find a lot of value in it for what it’s been - I hope this doesn’t decrease the quality of their offerings now that it’s more essential to online players.
XBox One is DOA with that kind of competition from Sony. I guess some company learned their lesson from the PS3 launch fiasco…
I dunno. The PS4 just seems like a better version of the consoles we have now. The Xbox One is trying something crazy and interesting with its media integration stuff. Not to say that the PS4 isn’t a solid device or anything, but does it really pass a “Why bother?” upgrade test? At least that answer is clear for the Xbox One. There is a reason for buying it before a decent library of games is built.
The only thing really hurting the Xbox One is the price, but that’s the easiest thing to solve. The PS3 launched $200 over the Xbox 360’s price and a year later. That didn’t matter in the end. The online-only and DRM issues were raged against forever in the PC world and ultimately no one really ever cared.
Or maybe the Ouya will crush everyone.
The only thing I have heard from a friend who’s a developer at a major software studio is that the PS4 is notably slower under the hood than the Xbox One; he was actually griping about the fact that porting games between them will be much harder, since the hardware speed differences are so pronounced.
I suspect that’ll translate into better looking Xbox games over time, or that the Xbox One will have longer legs than the PS4 will.
This doesn’t jive with what we know about the hardware so far.
The Xbone is rumored to have a slower GPU, we know it has slower RAM (well, lower bandwidth RAM to be precise - latency is actually lower than the PS4’s), and apparently it’s locking CPU, GPU, and RAM resources out away from games for the whole media center stuff.
The PS4 is got a lackluster CPU - but it’s rumored to be the same type as on the Xbone, it’s got a faster, more powerful GPU, and it’s sharing 8 gigs of GDDR5. Massive bandwidth, but high latency RAM which suits 3D rendering just fine (and I’m guessing will be cached by the CPU).
Well, it depends on what you think people want. If you think people want the “next generation in cool games, with shinier graphics and more of what they’ve always loved” then they want a PS4. If you think people want… some… multimedia gesture driven cable-box-like-thingummy that also plays games, then the Xbox One seems the way to go.
Might be the easiest to solve, but it’s also the single biggest factor; $100 is HUGE when someone goes to the store undecided.
Yeah, because the Xbox shot itself in the foot repeatedly, failed in Japan (by shooting itself in the foot repeatedly) and… yeah. Basically, the PS3 managed to claw its way back to something resembling parity after 7 years by virtue of Microsoft f-ing up over and over and over again. Is that something you want to bank on going into your next console generation?
Oh yeah. :rolleyes:
Here’s something I wrote to post to Facebook, but I’ll share it here too:
The problem with the Xbox One is that it’s visionary.
It has two big features that I’m sure looked amazingly innovative on internal PowerPoint presentations, but that in reality are major disadvantages. The first is Kinect, and the second is digital distribution.
Kinect is an amazing piece of hardware. It does things no other input system can do. Unfortunately, gesture-based input is fundamentally flawed. When you abandon a physical controller, you give up the immediate tactile feedback that you get from holding a physical device in your hand. When you press a button on a physical controller, you know that you’ve done something because of the nerve signals travelling back up your arm. But when you “press a button” with a gesture-based system, the feedback has to be visual or auditory. Even if the hardware itself has virtually zero latency, your brain doesn’t. It takes longer for these abstract cues to be processed than the low-level tactile feedback you get from your fingertips. What this means is that gesture-based systems always feel laggy and sloppy. It’s not a problem you can fix with better engineering. It’s a by-product of how your brain works.
Kinect is a design fiction. It looks like a huge leap forward. But when you try to translate that transformative vision into a user experience, you discover that it’s irreparably broken. Aside from a few limited niches like dance games, gesture-based control actually makes interacting with the Xbox more cumbersome and less immersive. But Microsoft couldn’t bring themselves to walk away from the fantasy. Instead of abandoning the Kinect as a failed experiment, they doubled down, making it an integral part of the system. Which is kind of weird, because when you look at the games they’re showcasing, none of them make significant use of the Kinect. It’s a central part of the system only because top-level execs at Microsoft have a Minority Report vision of the future and are trying to force that science fiction fantasy into reality.
The second visionary feature is a little more subtle, but just as damaging. The future of all media is digital distribution. Eventually we’ll all download everything instead of buying physical media. And once everything is digital downloads, you have to have some sort of DRM to prevent rampant piracy. However, that future isn’t here yet. People still buy games on disk and will continue to do so until broadband connectivity is as ubiquitous as running water.
Microsoft’s mistake was treating disk distribution as a just another method for transferring bits to the user’s hard drive. The Xbox One is built around the idea that you don’t play games off a disk, you *install *games from a disk. Once you make the disk a delivery mechanism instead of an ongoing data store, you have to have some form of DRM. Because if you don’t need the disk to play, there’s nothing stopping you from making as many copies as you want. And if you have DRM then you need a persistent internet connection to manage it. The requirements follow logically from treating disks simply as a delivery mechanism.
The beauty of both of these visionary decisions (from Sony’s perspective) is that they’re difficult to undo. Once you make the decision that the Kinect is required, dev teams will build their games around that assumption. In fact, they were probably pressured by Microsoft into using the Kinect as much as possible. So you can’t just drop the Kinect without breaking a lot of games. This makes it much harder for Microsoft to match Sony’s lower price – they’ve locked themselves into shipping every box with an expensive peripheral.
The digital distribution decision is similarly hard to undo. Microsoft can’t just say “Okay, no DRM! Share away!” because their install-from-disk model would lead to lots of lost sales. But changing how the operating system works at this date is a risky proposition. They’ve got one unified framework for handling game files. They treat all games as the same sort of entity – a digital file on the internal hard drive. Removing DRM would mean going in and creating an entirely new parallel way to handle loading disk-based games. That’s not a change you want to be making when you’re five months from launch.
My bet is that Microsoft won’t change a thing. The negatives of the Xbox One aren’t accidents. They’re the inevitable consequences of Redmond’s corporate vision of a highly-connected world of ubiquitous immersive tech. Abandoning them would require a degree of self-awareness that I don’t think it’s possible for a corporation that size to possess. Instead, I expect Microsoft to hunker down and power forward, gallantly marching toward the shining city of tomorrow they see shimmering in the distance beyond the desert sands ….
Here is an editorial that kind of summarizes what I think many are thinking(feeling?). I am not endorsing this writer; I have no idea who he is. I just think he has the mood captured.
So, if Microsoft’s new console is known as the Xbone, does that make its users Xboners? Avoiding that moniker might be reason enough to go with the PS4! 
All this may be true but it’s largely irrelevant. Kinnect games are generally not played the same way that regular games are. They work best for fun, casual games that are often played in a group, dance games as you mentioned, casual sports games and so on. These games were quite fun and quite popular on the first Kinect and the experience will only get better on the new one. Your average hardcore gamer may not be interested but the people who play Angry Birds and Farmville will be.
I think the Xbox will sell best with families offering something for everyone; perhaps casual games for a young child, hardcore games for an older child and media services (supported by Kinect) for the parents. In a sense it combines the distinctive appeal of the Wii(casual, fun motion games) and PS3(media capabilities) in the last generation which could mean a huge market with the right marketing and the right games/services to exploit the Kinect.
The PS4 has a more straightforward strategy and market, hardcore gamers but that may not be as large as Sony thinks especially since Xbox has enough exclusives to tempt some hardcore gamers even if they aren’t happy with the DRM policy and price. Plus the price advantage may not last. Microsoft has deep pockets and is perfectly capable of dropping the price if it needs to. It may do so after the first few months when anyway there are often shortages and price is largely irrelevant.
I completely agree. The future is clearly pointing towards digital distribution, and we already have a model in PC gaming. Nobody complains about the current uselessness of physical media in PC gaming because it has always been useless; without the key/activation it’s essentially nothing. So it’s a smooth transition into digital distribution.
The console market is very different, because now you’re actually taking something of value away; people hate to lose things they already have, in contrast to just never having it in the first place. For as long as I’ve been alive, you could transfer physical media and it’s a painful thought to contemplate losing that ability.
That said, MS is taking its lumps merely for being the first to step into the breach, but eventually, a generation never afforded the ability to re-sell games will go gently into that good night of DRM.
Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.
Will PS4 play blu ray?
Shit, even the Xbone has BluRay, so, of course.
If this is true, I find it very 1984-ish. Particularly in light of the recent NSA whistleblower issue with data mining.
I just find the idea of never being able to turn a device “off” somehow disturbing. Especially if it means the console I paid good money for will not work if the motion-activated whatever doohickie always has to be on for it to work. Is this really the case?
You won’t be. It’s the next generation, even if it’s further away than usual. This is a generation of transition. Digital games are going to become more popular. Fortunately, since digital will be a choice, it will be priced properly, just like happened on the PC with Steam. People have no problems with losing that value if they aren’t forced to still pay as if they still got it. That’s why Steam works.
Also notice that PC gaming doesn’t actually have what Microsoft’s new DRM does. Steam does not check in every 24 hours. The only thing comparable to that are the few always online titles, which received a similar backlash, if not quite as big. Why Microsoft thought they could get away with more onerous restrictions than PC, I don’t know.
Being visionary is great, but you don’t institute all of your vision at once! It’s the same problem with Windows 8. Heck, if there’d been a viable alternative to Office 2007 it would have hurt Microsoft dearly. Microsoft has an issue with trying to strongarm people into change instead of gradually steering it. If your new way of doing things is superior, your customers will naturally choose it if you just give them the tiniest push. And if it’s not superior, you don’t lose anything!
There’s no reason to suspect digital games will bring very cheap games like they did on PC. Microsoft and Sony have total control over their own ecosystems, PC gamers can get digital games from anywhere. MS and Sony have been running their own digital stores for a while now and there’s nothing at all like the massive discounts you constantly see in PC digital.
Nothing at all? Both have definitely done pretty aggressive sale pricing in their stores. I have probably a half dozen or so full 360 games I’ve bought digitally for $5. It’s not quite Steam firesale cheap, but…I’d say it’s something like it.
Also, I’ve heard that retail pressure is part of the story there: GameStop (and maybe others) use stocking policies to pressure companies NOT to discount online (to bolster their own used sales). I’m not sure how much MS’s system would upset that, but it’s a pretty obvious shot across GameStop’s bow.
Well, if it doesn’t, the transition won’t happen. And I think the companies want the transition to happen.
Plus it’s already happening with games being offered for free on the online services. PS+ gives 1 a month already, and Microsoft is going to be giving away 2 a month. Heck, PS+ gives you 18 free games right now if you sign up.
I’m pretty sure it’s the third party developers that are keeping the price inflated at this point. They don’t want to push out the retailers. The Steam model of sales has actually increased revenue for Valve. Both Microsoft and Sony want in on that.
EDIT: I don’t use the online services, so I didn’t know about prices being lower. I just assumed they weren’t based on the post I was responding to.
No actually, Steam checks in CONSTANTLY; What it DOESN’T do is boot you out of the game if it fails. At least, not immediately. But you won’t be able to start anything if you’re offline unless you’ve specially set yourself for offline mode.