Sony just spent hundreds of millions of dollars releasing a handheld in a post iphone reality. They released move. They continue to put out first party titles that don't sell particularly well. They hitched their wagon to blu-ray and it cost them dearly.
Do I think Sony is incapable of making good decisions? No. Do I think there is a frequent crisis of vision there? Yes.
With regards to Microsoft and Durango, I've been saying all year that I've worried that internal politics at Microsoft will make Durango a muddled mess. I also called bullshit on the 350 watt monster that nowgamer insisted was the next Xbox. I've also said here, I believe, that I was most concerned about memory bandwidth on the system, because I was worried they were going with something slow.
I'm no longer concerned about that. And the console they wanted to release before the system was delayed would have been. It would have been the underwhelming piece of hardware that leaked last year. It's only been in the last 5 months that I've been slowly convinced that Microsoft isn't going to sabotage itself, and honestly? I'm still a little concerned. There's going to be a big play to tie durango into windows 8 and windows phone 8 ecosystems, and that could pay off for them, or it could blow up in their face.
I'm not concerned about either system. I think they'll be about even for at least the first few years, from a performance perspective. If you want to ignore my input and opinions, more power to you. But when I see people operating from a premise that they want to believe, i.e., that Sony will be the king of hardware, and that they're going to blow away the competition, I have to call foul. I don't think that's the way it's going to shake out. And if you're walking into the next generation thinking that, you're going to be disappointed. Just like people spend the first two years of the PS3 being disappointed.
Fair enough! I don't think Microsoft or Sony would ever consider their system costing anywhere near that. But fair enough.
Peeps, Arthur is on the ball. though I got to say, Memory will be less of an issue since they will be pushing 2D (3D is dead as proven by CES) games at up to 1080p. So massive amounts of memory aren't as much of a concern as it is ability to do things quickly. Saying that, it's not going to be a gap of particularly significant proportions, not like the differences in the PS3 and 360 ecosystem. Developers will use the dev kits to fine tune their games to the benefits and limitations of each system. To us, the user, it will probably end up being imperceptible. 4 GB or 8 that's a lot of memory for 1080p in the console environment, which has the benefit of fine tuning and squeezing every last drop out of the hardware, it just takes time.
I think initially it will benefit the 360, devs will want sheer brute force, then the nuances of the PS4 start being worked out. Again these aren't as drastic as it was with this gen, where you are talking an entirely different approach of doing everything that touches the CPU. If Sony are smart they will instruct devs in how to optimize for faster RAM.