LordOfChaos
Member
If they do release in 2019 it will be interesting to see how the strategy of releasing a year before works out for them.
On the one side they'll have a full year of being the only "next gen" console. On the other side they will probably be the weaker console for several years after 2020. Most third parties are probably not going to fully support it either and simply release their Ps4/Xb1 games on it with some enhancements. By the time most big publishers are ready to fully get into next gen Microsoft would be the ones offering the more powerful system.
It would be fighting against the march of technology, but this article implies they're trying to get the early release without suffering on performance, by co-funding Navi's development and maybe getting either early access or exclusivity on some features of it.
They'll both be on the same fab node 99% chance so there's also that. The PS3 may have launched a year later but didn't manage to pick up a better GPU for it (significantly worse in some areas actually), for one example, because Microsoft co-funded Xenos's development and got unified shaders before most everyone.