PlayStation 4 vs. Xbox One

Yesterday we reminisced about the previous (well, for the next few days the current) console generation and today’s conversation will move to what’s upcoming. Sony’s PlaySation 4 is due for release this Friday on November 15th and Microsoft’s Xbox One will be out the following week on November 22nd.

Take note of who hasn’t been mentioned: Nintendo. While the Wii was a runaway hit, Nintendo continues to further segment themselves away from its peers. Nobody thinks of Nintendo when they think of playing AAA games. They continue to innovate and create fun ways to pass the time, Nintendo products now seem more like a toy than an exciting video game platform.

Earlier in the year when Microsoft and Sony announced their new systems, Sony immediately had the upper hand. Some of the reasons for this were fair and others were less so. Microsoft was very open from the beginning about building even higher walls around their precious garden. Their new console was to pivot to use a software licensing model where a physical game disc was pretty much useless. This meant you could not lend, borrow, or sell games unless Microsoft blessed the transaction. The other major misstep was that in order for this whole system to work, the system required an online connection to work.

Part of Microsoft’s problem was that their messaging was very poor. There are plenty of good reasons why a console could greatly benefit from an persistent online connection but the only reasoning ever given seemed aimed at limiting people’s abilities to lend, borrow, or sell games.

Microsoft also announced their plans that the new Kinect would no longer be an optional accessory, but would come with every console.

Meanwhile, Sony merely promised more of the same but with upgraded hardware. This was a less courageous but more comfortable proposition. The way people interact with their consoles would stay largely same, things would just look prettier.

Microsoft was looking for a console revolution while Sony was happy with an evolution. Ultimately, enough people were loud enough in letting Microsoft know that they had overstepped what people were comfortable with and wanted and they were forced to backpedal.

The licensing model was thrown out and the always connected internet mandate abolished. It was the right decision. The licensing model was always an unnecessary restriction from a customer’s standpoint and the internet mandate was only a means to enforce that restriction.

I still fire up 20 year old consoles from time to time to enjoy old games. Would I be able to do that if the console required connecting to some online service to play single player games? Absolutely not. Those services would have been shut down long ago and all the old games would be completely unplayable.

Despite Microsoft’s missteps during the initial announcements, Sony for some reason got a complete pass. By almost all accounts the PlayStation 4 is completely underwhelming. Ask yourself this question: How will the PS4 change the way you play games compared to the PS3? It won’t. Sure it shares many of the new gimmicky features with the Xbox One that most people will never use like game DVR and ‘play as you download’ options, but aside from beefier hardware it’s just more of the same.

Not only that, but conceivably the largest negative change made by either company was made by Sony. A feature that PlayStation owners boasted have boasted about endlessly for years was that they could play games online without having to pay an extra service charge. Sony announced that this would no longer be the case and would now require a PlayStation Plus membership during their initial unveiling and no one seemed phase.

It was an obvious move from Sony’s standpoint. Microsoft’s Xbox Live, though not free, was considerably more popular and helped the Xbox 360 become almost the default platform for many multiplayer based titles. The revenue allows you to provide a better service, and people showed they were willing to pay for a better service. There really wasn’t any other option, but why didn’t that get any negative publicity?

A portion of the reasoning lay with a certain fruit, an apple to be precise. When the Xbox 360 was released in 2005, iPhones did not exist and wouldn’t for almost two more years. The cult of Mac was nothing like it is today. The meteoric rise of Apple has largely taken place during the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation. You now have huge masses of people who are devout followers of the half-eaten fruit and are thus automatic enemies of anything related to Microsoft.
It adds a whole new element to the fanboy battle because you now have people who dislike the Xbox for reasons completely outside of the Xbox vs. PlayStation battle.

A strength of Microsoft going forward will be its 100% Kinected policy. The original Kinect and PlayStation Move were never and could never be anything other than a sideshow. As an optional accessory that huge numbers of console owners will never own, developers have very little incentive to put any serious time or resources into integrating those accessories.

People will learn over time that Kinect integration does not mean you will be dancing like an idiot in front of your television. The fact that each Xbox One comes with a Kinect means that developers will be much more likely to experiment with novel uses for the technology. The new Kinect 2.0 hardware is very impressive and some cool uses will undoubtedly surface over the upcoming years.

On the other side the PlayStation Move and Eye will never be more than half-baked accessories that most people will never use or even see in action and most developers will never care about.

Now here’s where things get really bad for Microsoft: raw power. The PS3 had more brute power than the Xbox 360 but it was such a pain to program for that for the first several years games didn’t fully take advantage of it and after that most developers were programming for the 360 first then porting over the the PS3 so most games ended up pretty similar in visual appearance.

Microsoft is using an 8 core CPU, an AMD GPU unit which has 768 shaders, and 8 GB DDR3 of memory for the Xbox One. Sony is using an 8 core CPU, an AMD GPU unit which has 1152 shaders, and 8 GB GDDR5 of memory for the PlayStation 4. (The actual specs require a more detailed explanation than that but I will leave it as that for the sake of creating a simple, yet accurate comparison.)

In plain English, Sony’s GPU has roughly 50% more raw power and the whole system’s memory interface is much quicker. This is a much bigger gap than existed in the previous generation. The mind-boggling aspect of all of this isn’t fully realized until you remember how much each console is going to cost. The PS4 runs $400 and the Xbox One will be $500.

I think it is very fair to put a $100 premium for the Kinect. You can argue whether you want it or not or whether you’ll ever use it or whatever you want, but $100 is a reasonable cost for the added accessory. That theoretically means that without the Kinect each system would cost the same . . . which makes no sense because the PlayStation 4 has vastly more powerful hardware!

Microsoft can talk all it wants about its cloud-power but its cloud can’t provide extra GPU muscle. This is a deficit that no future software update will ever rectify. Despite Microsoft’s marketing campaign about how it bumped up Xbox One’s CPU and GPU frequencies, this was nothing more than a meager increase.

From a software standpoint, reasonable predictions include that Microsoft’s services and ecosystem will continue to be superior. Likewise, Sony will continue to be the more open platform with more indie releases as well as more flexibility overall to developer wants.

In the end, if you are only getting one console, the decision stems down to: what console are your friends getting? The similarities are more than the differences and the only absolute is that you will want to be on the same platform as your friends.