I started a thread a few months back after Sony's reveal of the PS4, which you can find at http://www.gamedev.net/topic/639144-sony-and-the-ps4-im-impressed-your-thoughts/. Some people participated and put in their two cents in that thread about Sony.

How about one for Microsoft now that we've seen a glimpse of their next machine?

Me personally, I'm a little disappointed. They showed some cool looking features if you're someone who watches broadcast television, but I don't have a TV subscription any more, so it seems irrelevant to me... The fact that they didn't get to games until maybe 30 minutes into the presentation was a little worrying.

At the end, I'm very underwhelmed. I'm hoping they have something in store for E3, but my gut feeling is they won't really have much more to win me over. Currently, Sony seems much more appealing to me as someone who plays games and want to develop games.

Other opinions?

Microsoft has had botched marketing and PR for all of its recent products, whether they're any good or not. They have no idea who their demographic is or how they should target their marketing. Sometimes they emphasize things that only a small portion of their users care about. Other times they omit any useful information.

I personally am going to hold off on forming an opinion until I've actually used one.

I originally bought my PS3 because I thought it'd be a media hub, even though I owned a 360 already. I sold my PS3 because I preferred games on the 360 and found that I barely used the PS3 at all. Then Xbox added media apps, Xbox Video and Xbox Music. Now I watch most of my TV on it, I watch all my movies on it, stream music through it and still use it as a primary gaming device. So, for me, Xbox One is ideal and I'm looking forward to it.

Clearly games will be important to the platform, but they are not a distinguishing feature. Every gaming console should be able to do that well (except the Wii :) ). I think they were just trying to highlight the differences. I'm interested in whether their favorites library that showed all of the TV shows integrates with Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. I would love to have a single interface for favoriting and searching movies and tv shows.

While I certainly use my 360 a lot more to watch TV Episodes (Hulu Plus Mostly, don't have a subscription to a cable company) and movies than I use it to play any game, I do think they could have spent a bit more time on the technology in games. In my honest opinion the Xbox One Game Trailers didn't look much different that the same game trailers we saw when the 360 was announced.

Bear in mind that E3 isn't far off, that's when the games are likely to take a lead. 15 Xbox One exclusives in year 1 (with around half being new franchises) sounds good to me.

One word: fail.

Microsoft hates that most people see the Xbox as a game console. But guess what? It's a damn game console and I want to play games with it. I spent 28 minutes of presentation listening to idiots prattle about live TV and Skype. Do not care. Don't have or want cable TV. If they're not going to focus on games, I'm simply going to move on to someone who is *cough*.

As for E3 being the big games reveal, we'll see. Sounds like a BS excuse to me.

It appears from what we know that the PS4 has a bit of an edge in terms of graphics/compute power, and its probably going to be favored by spec-monkeys, but the XBox One is close enough in terms of hardware capability that the system software, XBox Live / Cloud infrastructure, and general integration with Windows PC / Windows service ecosystem could very easliy close the appeal gap for most people.

We got some specs and numbers to compare -- The Xbox One has 768 graphics compute units vs. 896 (+ 256 for compute only) in the PS4, both are DX11.1+ feature set, 8GB DDR3 + 32MB ESRAM vs 8GB GDDR5, and both are now confirmed to use 8 "jaguar" CPU cores from AMD. Much ado has been made about the DDR3 vs GDDR5 issue, but I think its mostly a wash -- GDDR5 has higher bandwidth, but it also has higher latency -- game devs have gotten pretty good at optimizing their memory layout in a way that would favor bandwidth over latency, but its not always possible or practical, and it always contorts the classical Object-Oriented worldview that most programmers think in, especially those who aren't gamedevs or involved in HPC work. If your problem makes you jump around a lot in memory, or you just want to write your software in the classical OOP fashion (as opposed to DOD), then the XBox One is probably going to penalize you less than the PS4.

In general, the PS4 is clearly tuned for games first, while the XBox one is a more balanced approach that makes concessions in order to facilitate non-game apps and likely to bring costs down.

My prediction is that the PS4 is going to come in around $100 more expensive than XBox One, even with the new Kinect bundled in. Due to the nature of GDDR5 chips, and Sony's late change from 4 to 8 GB they've got to have a more complex motherboard (more chips (16 per console), more electrical signals), more manufacturing expense, and they're forced to use the largest capacity chips that anyone makes, and which aren't in common use on graphics cards. Combined with an even larger SOC than is in the Xbox One, Sony faces a very real threat of supply chain issues either due to yield difficulties with their SOC or with the GDDR5 supplier being able to meet their demand.

To make an over-used car analogy, the PS4 is like an F1 racecar, while the XBox One is more like a high performance sports car. The former is purpose-built to excel at exactly one thing, while the latter is something that's a daily driver and still no slouch at the racetrack.

Where are you getting this information from? I haven't seen any hard technical specs anywhere, just "leaked" documents.

One word: fail.

I spent 28 minutes of presentation listening to idiots prattle about live TV and Skype. Do not care. Don't have or want cable TV.

Well, keep in mind that everything they showed with cable TV will likely work just the same with Video on Demand, Netflix, Hulu, HBO-Go, or whatever other non-cable subscription services you might have. In fact, a better way to look at it is that they're extending all the goodness they've already started with those services to your cable TV subscription, not the other way around.

And we can all have our personal preferences (and I'm with you not caring about cable TV), but the clear fact is that most people *are* spending more time on their 360s and PS3s watching Netflix and the like than they are playing games. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but the mass market is.

If the broader appeal (and hopefully a lower price-point) of the XBox One gives them a significant lead out of the gate (Say Microsoft moves 2x the units this Holiday season as Sony does, or has a 500k-1m lead by end of next year), it won't much matter the technical differences between the two. Sony's exclusives will use the extra hardware on their box, but cross-platform titles will look nearly identical and utilize the extra power for little more than eye-candy. Only if Sony can manage to beat Microsoft off the starting line will their extra hardware gain them advantage in cross-platform games.

However, like you I am concerned with the lack of concentration on games so far, from both parties.