Developers developers developers developers, right?

Seriously though: yeah, Xbox has always been developer friendly, due to MS already having a lot of practice making development environments for Windows. They already had Visual Studio, teams working on compilers, teams working on Windows, teams working on D3D, etc. That's a pretty good position to be in to jump into the console game. BTW, every 360 devkit comes with a free professional VS license.

Both Nintendo and Sony have traditionally had really, really, really crappy development environments in comparison. Rough SDKs, rough tools, rough compilers, rough IDEs, etc... Post-PS3, Sony has been putting a lot of effort into improving things in this area.

If they're willing to make the barriers to entry on their platform way lower and allow smaller teams to put their games on their system

Neither MS or Sony have said anything about XBLIG-type open development environments for the new consoles. Aside from homebrew hacks, XBLIG on the 360 is the only platform of this type still for home consoles.

Sony has made a lot of announcements about supporting independent developers, but you have to be aware that this is entirely different from XBLIG. This is about PSN/XBLA, which are not open platforms; these are only available to licensed developers. These gestures of "indie friendliness" are actually aimed at licensed development studios that are not publisher owned, not "indies" (people in garages).

I think "One" is designed to keep the focus on "XBox"

MS is leading in console video games due to:

comparitively easy and cheap software dev + xbox live + kinect + pixel shader horsepower + strong revenue protection

those elements are in-place and strengthened for XBox One

In the UK Sky TV charge about £50 per month for a PVR and TV service

XBox One sold on subscription will cost about the same, but you get an amazing game console,not just a PVR

So the XBox One allows MS to leverage the XBox to become a major Cloud TV company

Companies like Sky are trying to reinvent themselves (because Cloud has to replace Satellite) but MS has all the cards:

- better hardware

- better software

- years of experience

- in both cloud and devices

- MUCH more money

XBox Entertainment Studios will probably outbid rivals for the major sports, such as soccer and formula 1, in as many countries as possible

so the XBox One is a single device targetting 2 markets

and anybody can afford one on subscription, so price is not so important ...

I feel like that this is something that Dish should be selling (ie, a PVR box), not a game console maker. Don't get me wrong, the tech is really cool, but it is missing new features in terms of gaming. Remember, the Wii offered innovative gaming when it first launched, and therefore managed to take a huge share of the market. The PS3 launched along similar lines, and while I really like the PS3, it did suffer for the first few years. In this case, the PS4 is already offering more to gamers in terms of streaming, cloud services, and social functions. I was really impressed with the ability to let a friend remotely play your game. There are many applications for that sort of functionality, depending on how developers implement it. The Xbox One is not offering many gaming specific features so far. That may just be bad press, but even then, just judging by what they announced, it seems like Microsoft did not add many gaming features. The Wii U and the PS4 are already looking more attractive, by comparison. Moreover, the ridiculous fee for used games is just a dumb idea on top of that.

As far as developer support goes, I'm not really an expert, so I defer to others.

EDIT:

Also, the PS4, and the Xbox One, are both providing their own camera system. Granted, we don't know if they are matched, but I really doubt that they aren't at this point...

Based partly on what I read last night, and partly what I've heard from people who've actually used the hardware, my opinion is basically this: Microsoft realised too late in the game that Sony have beaten them on performance and that, unlike with the previous generation, it's not just about learning to code to the platform. You have 2 systems that are similar in almost every way except one is significantly slower. This means they need to focus in areas that don't involve going head-to-head with PS4, ie. TV, home entertainment, Kinect, Skype, etc, but also on first party games and platform exclusives. The latter is why they don't have many games to show right now - anything that's not exclusive is likely to look better on PS4 any any given stage of its development, and they may just not have many exclusives yet.

In theory, this should be great because ultimately it's all about the games, not the hardware. In practice, Microsoft don't have a clue how to support interesting games or the people who make them, so it's a marriage made in hell.

You have 2 systems that are similar in almost every way except one is significantly slower.

Neither is that significantly different from the other on released specs alone. The largest different is that Sony's seems to have the GPU and CPU on the same chip using the same cache, which could be interesting. Both are still quite a step up from what we have.

This means they need to focus in areas that don't involve going head-to-head with PS4, ie. TV, home entertainment, Kinect, Skype, etc, but also on first party games and platform exclusives.

Microsoft's strategy has been to be your living room's media center for quite some time, not just with this product. They want to build an ecosystem of microsoft devices for the largest aspects of your life. The living room is a key part of Microsoft's connected strategy. They don't want just hardcore gamers; they want everybody. Each product, Windows Phone, Windows Tablets, Windows Desktops, and now Xbox One, is designed to get people (not just gamers) inside the ecosystem because being in the ecosystem makes all the other products more appealing.

The strategy is much more about having your life connected by Microsoft devices and services than about trying to recover from finding out the competitor has an advantage in one area. This is more obvious if you watch Microsoft press conferences outside of their game specific stuff. They've been pushing this for a couple years now.

Neither is that significantly different from the other on released specs alone. The largest different is that Sony's seems to have the GPU and CPU on the same chip using the same cache, which could be interesting. Both are still quite a step up from what we have.

Released specs can be deceiving, and memory speed is very important. At least on the PS3 there you had the possibility to code things differently to make the most of it. Now, you just get one code path and approach for both systems, except it will run slower on one machine than the other. It'll be like when PC games have their assets reduced for the consoles, except the PS4 game might get cut down for the Xbox One as well. MS won't mind that, of course; it's when some devs say "we can only achieve what we need to on the PS4" that will concern them.

As for 'quite a step up from what we have', sure, a step up from current consoles. Not really a step up from a mid-range PC.

If I was being really cynical I might think this was an attempt to drive people back to Windows gaming on the PC, but then MS seem to want to drive desktop users away from Windows too if Win8 was anything to go by. They have an army of developers aiming shotguns at each others' feet right now. They court 'bro-dude' gamer IPs and then ship the hardware least suited to run it, and shut out the indies who won't care about RAM speed or a few extra compute units.

Microsoft's strategy has been to be your living room's media center for quite some time, not just with this product.

I know, but it's only with this product that they can't drag in hardcore gamers as well. So they absolutely have to bet the farm on everything else.

Kylotan, on 22 May 2013 - 11:19, said:
Released specs can be deceiving, and memory speed is very important.

The memory speeds aren't outright worse. One uses DDR3 and one uses GDDR5. GDDR5 has worse latency, but higher bandwidth. Sony is making a big bet on using their GPU for computing imo (edit: at least it seems this way if they are focussing so much on bandwidth over latency). It's not a super risky bet, but if we start leaning back towards more CPU intensive tasks it could be hurt by the latency vs the One. GDDR5 is based off of DDR3. GDDR5 is not an upgrade from DDR3, it is an upgrade from GDDR4, which is also based off DDR3 iirc. Their version numbers do not correlate to the same type of thing.

Quote
As for 'quite a step up from what we have', sure, a step up from current consoles. Not really a step up from a mid-range PC.

That's deceptive. PCs have a lot of overhead that consoles, in theory, shouldn't. They have worse specs, but they have more access to the full specs of the hardware than a PC game would. PC games also have to cover a huge swath of hardware, and usually are worse for it. Don't underestimate being able to optimize for standardized hardware.

That's deceptive. PCs have a lot of overhead that consoles, in theory, shouldn't. They have worse specs, but they have more access to the full specs of the hardware than a PC game would. PC games also have to cover a huge swath of hardware, and usually are worse for it. Don't underestimate being able to optimize for standardized hardware.

Not just standardized, but specially tweaked hardware. Sony at least mentioned that they've done some serious tuning work on how compute tasks are dispatched, for example. Then you'll have stuff like raw GPU command buffers too. The console hardware is probably comparable to a fairly high end PC, all told.

It's worth noting that the Xbox will be running three kernels on top of a hypervisor. That's what I'd be worried about for performance, not the raw hardware.

The memory speeds aren't outright worse. One uses DDR3 and one uses GDDR5. GDDR5 has worse latency, but higher bandwidth.

I must admit I am not as knowledgeable about memory hardware as many people here are, but I do know that there are people who have first hand experience of both consoles and some are saying that memory accesses on the Xbox One are a bottleneck in practice. And I will suggest that in a game context you're more likely to be bandwidth limited than latency limited these days - much of the time is spent pushing large textures or meshes around.

PCs have a lot of overhead that consoles, in theory, shouldn't. They have worse specs, but they have more access to the full specs of the hardware than a PC game would. PC games also have to cover a huge swath of hardware, and usually are worse for it. Don't underestimate being able to optimize for standardized hardware.

I'm not convinced. You're going to have broadly the same sort of APIs and access to the hardware as PC developers have and will have in future, because AMD don't want to make overly specialised hardware and MS/Sony don't want to make it difficult for developers. And the fact that the hardware is specialised means less and less these days, because most of the games that are going to really push the hardware are using off-the-shelf engines that are already heavily optimised for quite individual specs.

Interesting: http://kotaku.com/mainstream-media-reacts-to-the-xbox-one-509243303