So it seems that indie publishers can't self-publish on Xbox Live Arcade. They have to have publishing from Microsoft Game Studio or a third-party publisher.

I heard this crazy thing at Vintage Stock (it's very much like GameStop). The Xbox One will use the Kinect to see how many people are watching a movie (on say Netflix or Amazon). And if it's past a certain number, then The One will ask for you to pay an extra fee to allow more viewers (that are physically in the same place as you). Now I don't know how true it is. So I am for now calling this a rumor from an employee from an used games store.

i've heard of this rumor to. But i just don't see it happening, particularly if all i have to do to thwart it isput a bag over the sensor.

But then [in theory] The One just tells you that it can't play the video because the camera is blocked......

I don't have anything more to say on the TV aspect; I don't see a big demand for that from the current Xbox users I know, and I don't think Microsoft have the sort of retail presence that the likes of Netflix and LoveFilm have either. My prediction is that they will fail in this particular market, at least in the UK, but we'll see.

It has already been established that there will likely be no graphical difference between the majority of games on these consoles, and even the exclusive titles the difference would be almost unnoticeable while playing

No, it really has not been established. I saw one person in this thread claiming it would be the case; that is not the same as saying "it has already been established".

With there being a significant likelihood of the PS4 having both more memory available and more memory bandwidth, as well as more GPU power overall, there is a massive chance that the build process for many games may include downsampling textures, or using simpler shaders with fewer texture maps, when deploying to Xbox One.

raster operations is high frequency read/write which is latency sensitive

surely bandwidth isn't going to help here ...

ESRAM has 1/5 the latency of GDDR5

and converts high frequency read/write (zbuffering + blending) of pixel shading into a single sequential write transfer to DDR3

and opens wide the pixel shaders principal bottleneck

and frees the DDR3 bus for non-rendertarget transfers

which could mean xbox has 5x latency-sensitive performance and 0.75x bandwidth sensitive performance

my money is on the xbox ...

If you think bandwidth isn't important for graphical speed, you'd have to explain why GPU manufacturers are trying to get as much memory bandwidth as they can these days, even at the expense of latency.

I think most people still misunderstand the changing gaming market. The 'hardcore' gamer segment is probably less than a third of the existing market, and ignoring PC-fanboys that will never switch to console, the segment growth is pretty much limited to recruiting those who are too young to have yet become loyal to one camp or the other -- 5-10 year olds that Sony is mostly ignoring. There's mothers and grandmothers logging into facebook to play casual games, tons of people hunched over their cell phones and tablets. Maybe those people aren't going to buy a console, but its indicative of a changing market, and if not those people specifically, it says that there are a lot of people out there for which the console has not traditionally appealed to.

The other part of the market is made up of those who game more casually, players of casual games, middle-aged moms and dads, frat-boys who play Madden and an occasional match of CoD. Microsoft is attempting to do what the Wii managed to do through innovative, casual games -- bring new consumers into the market -- through media integration, and to a lesser extent casual/kinect games for the younger audience--and, I'll say it again because I believe it so much, price. Sony's strategy is to appeal to that 30% of the market and hope that the halo effect garners enough attention from the rest of it. Microsoft is trying to appeal to more kinds of people.

I think most people still misunderstand the changing gaming market.

That and most people look at themselves and their friends and think 'this is all types of people that use a console so not appealing to this people is wrong' forgetting that the 'hard core' market has been shrinking as a proportion of people who play games year on year.

Also, people are dumb.
Most arguments I've read have been people either talking rubbish, believing things which have turned out to be wrong or plain making shit up.

The most amusing perception I've seen is that Sony has made a games console where as MS has made a box which might also play games maybe and make it hard to do so. They seem to be stuck back in the late 90s/early 2000 where a console did one thing and one thing only and that because it could even try to do more than one thing somehow the gaming would be hard to do.

Now, from what I know of the specs (yay NDAs!) on pure hardware Sony have them beat but that doesn't mean that the Xbox can't play games and, more than likely, in most situations you won't notice a difference between them, at least not for the first year or two at a guess.

If you gave two dev teams the same game to make and told them each to focus on one of the consoles then I suspect the PS4 version, if given the time, would look better than the Xbox one.

But that's not what happens so until game teams have a chance to sit down the focus on one console or the other chances are they are going to look much the same... and with so many companies licencing out existing engines that might just be the case until the end of life with only people who focus on the PS4 exclusively and companies which do all their stuff 'in house' pushing the boundaries after a while.

raster operations is high frequency read/write which is latency sensitive
surely bandwidth isn't going to help here ...

blending ROPs are not done directly into main memory, they are done into cache on-die; while waiting for the data to appear the GPU can then swap in other workloads to do to cover the latency.

Bandwidth is a huge thing; less latency might be nice (and stacked DRAM might well help that in the coming years on the PC) but bandwidth remains king when it comes to rendering.

I dont get why ppl still want to play on consoles..computers can play games, and do everything else..How can consoles still be on market, whats the appeal? to me is zero..but probably because in Brazil its ridiculous expensive with stupid abusive taxes, both on games and console..

Is it game titles exclusivity? cant be.. that would be a market forced down ppls troat, so what Im not getting?

Exclusives, ease-of-use, longevity, habit. Take your pick.

The PC is a fine gaming platform, but for most people (the non-hardcore gamer) the PC gaming world is confusing because of the variations in the platform. You and I know what kind of video card we ought to buy, processor, how much RAM, if we want to game. We know which video settings to tweak if a particular game is running more slowly than we would like. We know how to install and uninstall our software, add storage to our machines when we run out of room, and lots of other technical things that are simple for us.

But you and I are not most people. If you spend any amount of time window shopping for PC games or graphics cards, you see tons of people wonder out loud "Will this game run on my computer?", "How good of a graphics card to I really need?", "Are they really that expensive?". "Do I get PCIe, or AGP? Is my PC PCIe 3.0? I don't know." Everything about PC gaming is confusing for 70% of the population.

When someone buys a console, they know that for the next 5-10 years all they have to do is pick the right color game box, and pop the disc in the machine. They always get the same, simple experience, no upgrades necessary, no confusion, no additional expense.

There's plenty of other good reasons too -- the living room experience of console gaming is much different than sitting at a desk. The experience can be easily shared with friends and your kids. Its generally cheaper to start -- sure you might be able to build a cheap PC that has equal or even greater specs than a console, but the OS, drivers, and other abstractions end up being such that you need a 50% advantage in resources (or more), just to match what the console is able to do by not having any of that overhead.

There are advantages to both sides, but there are fewer downsides on the console for the average user. The only real downside to the console are that, past year 2 or 3, you're falling behind the performance curve of a reasonable gaming PC, and that you're stuck with it for 3-4 more years. If you're the kind of guy that values being on the bleeding edge of performance, you're a PC gamer, but you've got to pay to keep up, so it has to be really worthwhile to you. I don't think most people are like that, at least not in the US anyways.

I imagine, however, in Brazil its a very different situation where, because of the cost of consoles and games, there are only PC gamers for the most part, and as a result all gamers are necessarily technically adept.

But you and I are not most people. If you spend any amount of time window shopping for PC games or graphics cards, you see tons of people wonder out loud "Will this game run on my computer?", "How good of a graphics card to I really need?", "Are they really that expensive?". "Do I get PCIe, or AGP? Is my PC PCIe 3.0? I don't know." Everything about PC gaming is confusing for 70% of the population.

Hell, I know people who WORK in the industry who couldn't build their own PC to run games well without 'what should I get?' advice... and more to the point many of them don't want the constant hassle; they just want to drop a game in a tray and get on with playing after a long day/week at work.

On the other hand, we could have a scene where shoppers go out and here's what happens: the parents won't be sure if they really want this integrated device thing, while the hardcore gamer kid will almost certainly be against it. Who does that really leave? The casual gamer? Microsoft would really have to advertise their console, way more than Nintendo does.

No one has established that the hardcore gamer would in fact choose a PS4 over the Xbox One. It has already been established that there will likely be no graphical difference between the majority of games on these consoles, and even the exclusive titles the difference would be almost unnoticeable while playing. On the other hand, the Xbox has a much better controller, a significantly better infrastructure for multiplayer games, and a friend network that millions of people are already leveraging. I'd be interested in seeing just how much the PS4 "30% faster" GPU really matters.

I'm not talking about what has been established or not. It is hypothetical of course. Moreover, I'm not talking about just graphics here. I'm saying that the PS4 is offering more game related features than the Xbox One. Things like game streaming, live game footage streaming, social features, etc.

Moreover, the question of the capability of the Xbox One to play games is not in question here, we all know that it can play games that are graphically at par (probably at par) with that of the PS4. The catch is that the Xbox One is not offering much that is new as a gaming console (other than a hardware upgrade), which is what Microsoft is still calling it, no matter what we might like to call it. So we still need to judge it as a gaming console.

Also, the question is that does the average person want to shell out the cash for this sort of thing. Is there a good reason for someone to want to buy something like this? If that reason exists, can Microsoft convince people its a good reason?