Here’s an actual exchange that happened yesterday:
Me and three coworkers get in a cab in Seattle. On the way to the airport we’re talking about the meeting we just had with a developer.
Cabbie: “Hey, are you guys in the game industry?”
Coworker: “Why yes, we are!”
Cabbie: “What do you is going to happen with the next generation of systems?”
Coworker: “We’re actually interesting in what YOU think is going to happen.”
Cabbie: “The Xbox … I don’t know … it seems more like a cable box. I have a 360, but I’m thinking this time around I should get a PlayStation.”
Coworker: “Good answer!”
Cabbie: “… ?”
Coworker: “We all work for Sony … .”
I’m just surprised that Xbox doesn’t realize that not being backwards compatible with XBLA games makes a lot of us pretty neutral on the “which console to buy” question. I mean, I’d just stick with Xbox if I already have content for it, but if I don’t, I’ll decide on other features. Which is, I assume, not the way Xbox wants it.
Really, the only reason I went with XBox is that it was cheaper at the time than PS3. Without backwards compatibility, it’ll probably come down to price again.
Xbox will likely win that one. 8 gigs of GDDR5 ain’t cheap. The GPU on the Ps4 is also stronger on paper, but I’m not sure how that translates to manufacturing costs.
Yeah, but this time around the PS4 will be unambiguously better. The PS3 was better in theory, but it used an oddball system that made it hard to develop for and get the most out of a system, so they’d effectively be tied. PS4 will basically be the exact same thing, just better. I suspect there are a lot of people who will care about the technology/power (yet still oddly buy a console anyway)
I own a 360, and I do use it for media streaming as well as games (Netflix and Amazon, as well as files streamed from my desktop). So far I’m not very enthusiastic about the new console. I don’t particularly care about backward compatibility or restrictions on used games, but… I don’t know. Nothing I’ve heard about it really knocks my socks off, and if there really is a requirement for Kinect to always be enabled that’s pretty much a dealbreaker for me. I’ve never owned a Sony PSx, but I’m thinking about jumping ship.
The only thing that worries me is the possibility of Microsoft phasing out support for the 360 on Xbox Live, which is one way they could artificially pump up demand for the new box.
Here are a few things for me in this next round. I have a 360 right now…probably won’t buy a next gen console for at least a year after release, so things could certainly change between now and near 2015.
Games that are developed for both platforms (which will be most), are almost certainly likely to look exactly (or near exactly) the same on both systems. Developers aren’t going to build higher graphics for the PS4, especially since porting between the two will be trivial given how similar the hardware is. So, they’ll design to the Xbox One and port to the PS4, more than likely.
I prefer the Xbox controller to the Dual-Shock controller. Considerably. While I haven’t held either of the new controllers, both look like improvements on the same design as the last generation, and the Xbox 360 controller is the best I’ve ever used.
While each system will have their own exclusives, I’m more familiar with the Xbox franchises, and I like them a lot…all things being generally equal, I’d prefer to keep with those.
I actually use Kinect (Sports, Dance Central), and Kinect vs PS Move, especially in this next generation, isn’t even a contest.
So, when it comes time, unless a real reason to the contrary steers me to Sony in the next year and a half, I’ll probably get the One.
Graphics and general smoothness/frame rate will almost certainly be higher on the PS4. Yes, they’re not going to completely rewrite the games for both systems, but it’s relatively easy to add certain features for more powerful hardware. You can run at a higher resolution, at a higher frame rate, turn on different post processing effects, remove less stuff when you go through and do optimizations, etc. In the current generation, games that are badly ported to PC even without any extra features look dramatically better for this reason.
I see nothing about the XB361 that will make me deviate from my plan of buying a PS4 when they get down to $250 or so. If either of them throw in backward compatibility my view may change.
The XB361 has Blu-Ray, which I find damn amusing after MS held out on adding it to the 360. And they will be paying licensing fees to Sony. Buy a XB361 or a PS4, Sony gets money either way!
Held out? Blu-ray barely existed in the consumer space in 2005. It would have been suicide to include it in the 360…
Actually, I just looked. The first Blu-ray players were released to the public in June 2006. The November 2005-launching couldn’t have include a Blu-ray drive even if Microsoft wanted it to.
Microsoft says they are going to use the “cloud” to offload the processing of complex physics computations in games.
This sounds unlikely to me. Anyone that knows about graphics/physics engines care to comment?
There are issues when dealing with Physics and the latency between the GPU and CPU on the same mother effing mobo, nevermind across state lines via the net.
I would assume that even with predictive algorithms and corrections being streamed back, it’s going to be really difficult to make interactive physics simulations that can be actionable by the CPU within any single frame, or that are offloading enough of the processing to make them worth it. At which point, why not use a canned animation, rather than rely on the internet for something that has limited interactive potential.
Yeah, that sounds like bullshit. Involving anything on the internet in the basic rendering/physics/AI/etc loop brings the whole thing to a halt. It might have some limited use in some sort of asynchronous processing, but then if it’s not time critical you might as well just do it locally anyway. I’m not seeing much good coming out of that.
Exactly. It would make no nevermind to the end user whether those smoke particles in the distance are being accurately calculated by the cloud, or animated in exactly he same way locally by a pre-computed animation.
There. Were. No. Blu-ray. Drives. In. Existence. In. 2005.
Microsoft couldn’t put a Blu-ray drive in the Xbox 360 because it was physically impossible. That’s beside the fact that they probably didn’t want to anyway because Sony owned a big chunk of the technology and if HD-DVD won the HD disc battle over Blu-ray, that would have been better for the Xbox division.
For privacy reasons, you can have the kinnect diskinnected.
360 lives on, there is going to be one more iteration of the console being released, probably under the slim moniker, and zero support for media like netflix. Three games that I know of , are launching this summer/fall , among them being GTA 5. So I think we can count on five more years of support for the 360, before the bones are embedded in enough households.
As some posters have noted, there are enviroments that always on will not be available, and microsoft is claiming that they are testing “codes”. So sailors deployed in an Emcon enviroment, as well as forward deployed troops, can use the system. So obviously, core command is aware of the problem, which means that a secondary industry of providing these codes will probably launch in parallel with the launch of the console.
I read most of the above on both Ars and digital trends, among others, but dont have cites available offhand. The code generation is just a supposition on my part, but the special enviroment codes were mentioned on Ars.
But this has NEVER mattered in the console space. Seriously. Console buyers, by and large, do not care AT ALL. If they can get an Xbox 1 for $50 less than the “comparable” PS4, the PS4 has a major problem unless the 1 develops a HUGE reputation for SERIOUS, SERIOUS problems in its games (odds of this happening: Basically none. It would need to be worse than the RROD issue.).
We know you a techno-nut, Beef, and you care deeply about processor speeds and things, but the overwhelming number of people buying these devices have as much in common with you as you do with a bunch of guys gathered around a console playing Madden. Possibly because a lot of the people who buy these things ARE people who gather around consoles playing Madden.
The technical differences in power between these two devices are going to mean zippo in the market.