AwesomeOcelot

I don't think there are differences in bottlenecks that significantly effect anything and not having direct access to the hardware is more annoying for a developer than actually an impact to performance (for over 15 years).

I don't know about the Jaguar based CPU in the Xbox1-80 and PS4 being 25% the performance of an i5 but they are built for low power consumption, it definitely will be under 50% with a lot of metrics, especially as the i5 overclocks so easily and the new Haswell improvements. You've got to remember though, this is a microarchitecture designed to compete with a mobile i3 of ultrabooks and tablets, Sony and Microsoft have to aim for around 90w for the whole system, the GPU is going to be eating up a lot of that, a i5 gaming system is going to have 500-1000w PSU, the CPU could use over 90w. Also a more powerful CPU may make little difference paired with the GPU they're using. Sony and Microsoft don't pay retail prices and they usually sell at a loss on launch. The custom nature and size factor do cost them more. Radeon HD 7870 is 2.5 TFLOPS, the PS4 GPU is 1.8 TFLOPS, the Xbox1-80 GPU is 1.2 TFLOPS. You're looking more at a Radeon HD 7850 for the PS4.

Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition goes for around £360 which is around $550, but then the Xbox1-80 is $660, the card is cheaper than $500 in the US which I thought we were talking about since Xbox1-80 is $500 in the US.

That graphics card will have over 3.5 times the compute power of the entire Xbox1-80 on its own, very few people buy cards that expensive, and very few people would spend more than $450 on a console. If you look at previous generations, and the current competition, $500 is expensive, and in a territory that's only been successful with the PS3 which can be explained by the Blu-Ray player since you'd be paying more than a PS3 for a Blu-Ray player. For a lot of people, especially with the charge per month to play online (that's going to be $45-60 a year). $500 is above the range they're willing to pay, and there are two competitors that will be better priced, despite what Nintendo say, they will be dropping the price of the WiiU.

Without Blu-Ray PS3 would have been much less successful, since players were really expensive (I seem to recall $500-1000) the PS3 price wasn't so painful if you had a HD television and needed a Blu-Ray player. Without a Blu-Ray player the PS3 would never have gotten the install base initially for publishers to target it, especially with the difficulties of developing for it. The Xbox1-80 needs the equivalent of that, or I can't see people willing to pay $500. Do Microsoft think their TV integration is the equivalent? Course correction is reasonably simple for them though, get rid of the Kinect, drop price $75-100. It's still going to be less powerful than the PS4 with a less impressive exclusive line up.

Shooting people like its cool. There's room for some games to feature non-lethal game styles, RPGs and Deus Ex-style games, but in Bioshock: Infinite we're talking about a shooter here, it's not murder if they're trying to kill you, gameplay should come first, obviously "game" developers often disagree. I think maybe some games could put the question there, the people I'm ambushing might not be bad people, and perhaps characters could note your body count or even be afraid of you, which to be fair to Irrational, they added a tiny bit of both into Infinite, and I always felt sorry for the "monsters" in Rapture. I think the problem is the story is trying to be something contradictory to the gameplay, this was most apparent in Tomb Raider 2013 where the gameplay was ridiculously contradictory to the story. They're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and I'm not impressed with the "cinematic" experience of games, where the writing and story-telling isn't any where close to the quality of great movies, TV shows, and especially novels, not even remotely close. There's models of great story telling in games, and the pinnacles are Fallout/Fallout 2/Fallout: New Vegas, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines/Deus Ex: Human Revolution/Bioshock, Portal/Bastion, and Psychonauts/Half Life 2, you don't get that same narrative experience from the other forms of media.

That's never been how sharing was going to work on the XBone, it's just what fanboys imagined after they heard about the shared library feature.

People are already calling it the Xbox180.

Cringe worthy, but looks good enough. Using a gamepad to send messages when there's smart phone and tablet apps for PSN, not going to happen. Not sure how open it's going to be, it would be more useful if it all integrated with twitter, facebook, and youtube but Sony likes its walled gardens and propriety systems.

For the US that would require dropping the Kinect 2 requirement which they will not do. They could for other regions where the XBone is inexplicably more expensive even when taking VAT and duty into account.

DRM circumvention is not copyright infringement, cracking is not the same as pirating, you don't understand what the words mean.

Steam's DRM and XBone's daily check-in are not the same, with Steam you can play offline. The only time you are required to be online for DRM unless you're using an online service is when you buy a Steamworks game on disc and need to register it. I don't actually mind them blocking used games, the parts that are like Steam I don't have a problem with. There wasn't really a used game market for PC because you may as well just pirate if you're going to do that. A lot of people who've had broadband for over 10 years have experienced outages. I don't want things I've paid for to stop working for no legitimate reason concerning me, companies shouldn't be hurting paying customers with DRM. I've experienced far more service outages on the publisher side, and buggy DRM systems that didn't work correctly. PC gamers did get pissed at DRM, Ubisoft's always on DRM, Blizzard and EA unnecessarily shifting single player games online, I boycotted those games, and apart from the ones that got patched later I still don't play those games and probably never will.

That's what was explained in the Kotaku article, the Kotaku blogger is just a whining idiot who apparently likes ****ty games with ****ty gameplay. It's not the first game to have different failure states for QTE many games have this, Mark of the Ninja has them with the same XP boost mechanic, although it also punishes you with noise or failure in some contexts. It at least makes the game bearable for gamers, who'd rather play games than watch for screen cues for button presses, if they took away the XP bonus then it would default to a good old fashioned canned kill animation, those were fun the first 3 times you saw them.

I can't even process that idiots complaint, Crytek are just giving retards what they want. He's complaining about QTE failure states not giving him control or challenge, they're QTE, there is no control or challenge, it's not even a game. It's the natural progression of console games, from real games to QTE to pretend QTE, people just want to believe they're controlling something. Soon there will be pre-rendered movies with button overlay and a score at the top.

If they sell more then it doesn't matter, they've increased their revenue. They couldn't take it out of their own cut, they'd have to get publishers on board and share the load. The only people losing out are retailers that make a lot of revenue from second hand sales.

Steam actually had the same vulnerability. Wrong, that's not the vulnerability I was talking about. Also my browser doesn't have that vulnerability (as far as I'm aware no good browser does, who uses Safari anyway), it's kind of ridiculous that browsers even support it, let alone companies like Steam and Ubisoft using it with buggy software, but if you are directed to links and click yes to anything then you've got larger security concerns.

Didn't they sell Windows 8 for a quarter of the usual Windows price for a few months? They really wanted people to use Windows 8, they probably couldn't give it away.

When used games blocking rumours blew up around Sony I suggested they could sell games for cheaper, getting more revenue for themselves and publishers. I'd laugh if Microsoft turned around a month before release and said "yeah, we're now selling our games at $30-40" when PS4 games are still priced at $60. Sure, people are still going to choose the PS4 because of daily online activation, weaker hardware, and compulsory expensive Kinect crap but it still keeps Microsoft in the game.

I've never understood how Xbox gamers are fine with a subscription for nothing.

If Microsoft brought a closed system to PC, Windows would lose most of its market share eventually after the remaining people have moved on from Windows 7, not even Mac users would tolerate such restrictions let alone Windows users. If Windows 8 and Games for Windows Live stores are anything to go by they wouldn't even be gilded cages, they'd be rusty iron ones. The moves by Ubisoft and EA have just made me buy less Ubisoft and EA games, because I know I'd have to deal with their unnecessary layer of DRM. Uplay is crappy software, that installs vulnerabilities into your browser without informing you which I think is on the level of Sony's rootkit. Origin isn't bad because I've never had to use it, I registered an EA account and login in-game, but I wouldn't want to manage 8 accounts from every major publisher.

Not really. Perhaps if you watch a low quality video with bandwidth issues. CoD on the Xbox360 and PS3 rendered at less than 720p, 1024x600 to render at 60 frames per second, that's a low resolution. Just rendering the same game in 1920x1080 is a hell of a difference, and on the PS4 people are suggesting that devs have 6-7GB to play with of GDDR5, being able to have 2GB for textures instead of 256MB will make an incredible difference. 8 years is a long time in terms of hardware, being PC architecture, there's a new generation every 6 months, doubling speeds every 18 months. Rendering technology has slowed a bit, with consoles having a long generation and the increased amount of multi-platform releases. People still look back to Crysis as the game that tested PC hardware a game that came out in 2007. Also the budgets and team sizes massively increased to create the higher fidelity assets, that's not going to happen again. People forget that the launch titles for Xbox360 didn't look great. CoD has never been a leader in terms of graphics, or anything else for that matter. The PS4 reveal games, the first Unreal Engine 4 games, will be impressive especially with the amount of stagnation there has been in recent years.

Xeon is not separate to Haswell, there were Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Xeon processors, Xeon at the same level as the marketing groups i3, i5, i7, Pentium, and Celeron. The Haswell Xeons E5/E7 have not been released, they'll be releasing the different models in Q3 and Q4 of 2013, before the Mac Pro is released. Some Xeons have had identical consumer variants for many generations of Intel processors, recently this has been some of the i7 processors.

New PC games have split-screen, more have local co-op on the same screen. There's been a decline in local co-op on consoles as well, but it's been slower because consoles have been much slower to adopt online gaming. The break in this trend is casual motion and rhythm games that tend to all be local co-op. PC has had LAN gaming which makes way more sense than split-screen for the popular competitive genres, FPS and RTS. I doubt this practice is what's getting people upset about DRM, people could always bring their console if a friend has all the leads and pads, and if it's a good game both friends like, they probably both own it. People are upset because they dislike having to pay for games, they'd rather not so they're upset about losing the second hand market and lending to friends. People would be upset if Sony cracked down on PSN account sharing. The same complaints didn't happen for PC because piracy is easier, faster, and cheaper than the second hand market or lending to friends. If you're going to not give revenue to the people who make the games you might as well not give any money at all. The second hand market was already not a factor in PC gaming, so no body mourned its loss. --- Any news on the PS4 and its HDD? I've heard Sony said it's replaceable. Are they going to use it to cache game data? Discs are slow, consoles have had awful loading times compared to PC.

Psychonauts, the platforming was mediocre, the combat was terrible, but some of the puzzles were great, and it was all executed poorly. I thought Stacking was great, it was simple and short, but it did what it set out to do, and it was executed well. Brutal Legend was really bad, everything from the combat, driving, and especially the strategy was a massive fail. Costume Quest I stopped playing after a minute because it was full of QTE. Iron Brigade I haven't played, but it's the only Double Fine game I've seen praised for its gameplay. With Double Fine the theme, the art direction, the dialogue, the music, and the humour are always good. Double Fine have people that understand game mechanics, they just seem to let artists and writers dictate it, and you see the results.

That actually reinforces the point. 3 freemium multiplayer only games and one sequel (that couldn't replace a title decade old) don't measure up to the AAA single-player titles consoles enjoy. In what way do they not measure up? Freemium is a good model for multiplayer, games struggled from the 90's until today to maintain a multiplayer population and finance servers unless they're Counter-Strike. They're all much better multiplayer games than anything on consoles, and also the AAA multi-platform titles. Of course they don't measure up in terms of budget, but gameplay and graphics they surpass them with ease because consoles are terrible at FPS, and the 360/PS3 were underpowered on release, let alone now. There hasn't been a great PC single player pure FPS since Crysis, on the other hand there hasn't been a good console FPS ever. Hard Reset was pretty good if you like that sort of thing. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a great game because of the features it has beyond FPS. The Bioshock series is good despite them being terrible FPS games, and Infinite is very overrated. There's not many great single player FPS games released in the last decade whether PC or multi-platform, it's a dying genre.