Out of Pod Experience

The irony is some how this abortion of a machine will somehow succeed.

You know Microsoft is starting to forcefully take these videos down right?

Microsoft removes DRM from the console.

Holy freaking ****

It can do TV and some niche US only sports malarkey, but thats because its a Media Center PC under the hood geared towards gaming.

Look at their E3 presentation and take it as that alone, the first reveal was mainly for shareholders, E3 was for gamers. And... I'm torn now. I can swap my PS4 preorder for an XB1 if I choose....

True, but there's benefits to knowing that theres a standard platform to code for across the base, and given most publishers build games with the console hardware in mind its natural to assume there will be a corresponding leap in the demands games put upon the superior PC hardware. We won the war, but alas it meant we would never have a true equal again.

Nintendo coded to the Wii and the Gamecube, look at Mario Galaxy 2 and tell me you aren't impressed they got that kind of a performance by coding to the metal.

This is enough to put me back on the fence, if they drop the Kinect and match the PS4 or beat it on price... then damn they could turn this into a real bloody console war. Sony isn't doing so good and taking the first step is the hardest after admitting you are wrong, Microsoft seems to have turned a good chunk of the playerbase, namely NATO forces and their extended families by intent back towards the Xbox from the restrictions.

And I wish the Vita had more love, its such a waste of potential... glad I never bought one and stuck with ma Game Boy colour

It's healthy competition in action in my opinion. Still needs some work but this does shave the gap between the two in perception term by a fair bit methinks.

The Xbone will be fine. They will change some things. Throw in some exclusive titles and a year from now this will be forgotten.

If i were to make a guess, the preorder numbers must have been abysmal, as in "make the Wii U look like an amazing success" terrible. And the guys at the market research were ringing alarms how the XBone had no chance to turn that around, seeing as there weren't any selling points over the PS4. There is hardly anything else that can make a multibiilion dollar corp scrambling for a 180 degree turn.

I did also hear some rumors that they were absolutely certain that the PS4 would have something like 4GB of DDR3 RAM with a similar CPU and GPU and that the price would be also 499$/€. At which point they could have sold their policies with better hardware for the same price. But after Sony topped them easily in that regard, their entire strategy went out of the windows.

Well, as of now... the PS4 still has better hardware for the better price. And lets be real here, it's not a bit better, we are talking about big differences. The fillrates on the PS4 are way better than on the XBox and memory bandwith is currently one of the most crucial measurements what a developer can do in any imaginable way with a game (because it's one of the biggest bottlenecks). And we are talking about three times the amount for the PS4, that is huge. Now the ESRAM could mitigate that advantage, but first: it's just a bandaid solution nobody has much experience with, so it's easier to develop and get more out of the PS4/PC. Second: even if optimized perfectly, the effect isn't that big. If i double my most optimistic estimation, the PS4 will still have effectively twice the bandwith instead of thrice.
And you will most likely see that kind of optimization only for the exclusives, i can hardly see that kind of effort for multiplatform titles, when every other platform has the same memory architecture. Meaning for all those titles the XBox will be the garbage-looking unloved stepchild of the title. And i'm not just talking about graphic quality: FoV, quality of the AI, how much can you affect/destroy your environment, number of players/npc, quality of physics... everything of these and more are affected by the better specs of PS4/PC, meaning both of them get reasonably good results and XBox gets the dumbed-down version.