With the launch window losing in fast for both the most anticipated consoles of next-gen, we have seen comparisons between power, games, price among other stuff. Microsoft’s Xbox One was hit pretty hard by the gamers when Microsoft announced its strict DRM policies for the Xbox One and also the price was a $100 more than that of the PlayStation 4.
Just last month, EDGE published a report citing that many senior developers working with both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One stated that PS4 is definitely 50 percent faster than its rival with differences perceived on both the consoles being “obvious” and “significant”. One developer also concluded that Xbox One is weaker and it is extremely difficult to use the ESRAM of the Xbox One.
Last week at the Eurogamer Expo, when Phil Harrison, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, was asked if he has received the same type of feedback from the developers. To which he responded with:
Well I think there’s a couple of things I would say, one is that every platform I’ve ever been involved in somebody has said ‘oh, this has got more gigaflops or more teraflops than the other one,’ and at the end of the day it never really matters…
It’s all about having the best games and having the most impressive experiences, and clearly Xbox One has the best games. So that would be my first response.
He continued:
The other is that any time that you ask a developer – including, by the way, our own internal studios – in the run up to launch of a console you’re going to get a slightly nuanced answer because the operating system’s not finished, the performance of the machine’s not locked, and as you may be aware we can increase CPU and GPU capability on Xbox One…
So I think it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from that based on pre-launch unfinished hardware and unfinished operating systems….
My main response is going to be always that it’s about having the best game experiences and the widest possible set of content that people want to play.
He mentions unfinished hardware and operating systems, whereas the launch is only a month away now, how much more unfinished business is left with the Xbox One?
Sony Computer Entertainment’s Vice President and Managing Director for the UK, Fergal Gara, was also asked the same question, what type of response he was getting from developers. He replied:
We are getting similar feedback, and the overwhelming thing is that developers are delighted with PlayStation 4,” he told us. “It’s a big step on for us from PlayStation 3 which was less easy and there was a lot of work to be done post day one. This time we’re in very very good shape…
[Developers are] such an enormously important community to the success of the device…You heard Mark Cerny say back in February that it was five years of listening and responding – it has got to yield a good result, so having the developer at the core of your thinking right from the start has delivered that spec, and delivered the development tools that they’re all finding so easy…
So yes, there’s no glass ceiling in terms of what [developers] want to do, and it’s easy to do it. They are two incredibly strong bits of feedback and we’re really proud of it.
PlayStation 4 sports an 8GBGDDR5 memory as opposed to 8GBDDR3 found on the Xbox One. Both have GPUs provided by AMD. PlayStation 4 is set to launch on November 15 in the U.S. followed by EU launch set for November 29. Xbox One will be launched on November 22 in 13 key countries.
