So both consoles have been out for a while now, and I'm curious what everyone's opinion on them are. Which is better, which is worse? I'm open to hearing opinions on anything. I was lucky enough to have both of them, and in my opinion, I'm not seeing much of a difference between the two. I do think the Kinect is a cool and nifty piece of technology, but undoubtedly not going to be used much this generation either.

I'm tempted to move this over to console and mobile, and maybe that's a good thing if it picks up more of a topic.

I'm not seeing much of a difference between the two.

For players, both have a different combination of exclusive titles. That is all the difference in the world.

If you want to play the Halo series, or Titanfall, or Gears of War, etc, then you need an xbox one.

If you want to play Final Fantasy 14, the latest Street Fighter, Last of Us, etc, then you need a PS4.

If you want to play Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart 8, Smash Bros u, etc, then you need a Wii U.

The list of games on each titles has always been -- and will continue to be -- the biggest difference between consoles.

Now for the lesser differences.

I was lucky enough to have both of them

There is no luck involved. They are a luxury device. MANY households have MULTIPLE game consoles. They are not a device for themselves, but they are a means to the end of playing games. If you want to play a particular game, and you have money to buy the parts, then you do so. If the game is an exclusive for a specific platform, and you have the money, you get that console.

Ownership is not exclusive. Many homes have many consoles. I've got six that I can play right now, more that I can dig out if I want to.

There is no luck involved on any of them. There is no 'better' involved on any of them. If I am in the mood to play a specific game, that is the only defining factor.

I don't say "I'm here with some people and we want to play Little Big Planet 2, but I'm not going to because the PS4 has a faster system bus; the PS3 is not the most technically superior device." Nope, I would not care about technical specs, I'll fire up the correct console and play the game I want to play at the moment.

Which is better, which is worse?

Better for what? Worse for what?

Hardware-wise, both are technically quite similar. There are slight differences in the performance of individual components, but unlike the previous generation, what works for one is going to work virtually identically on the other.

They have differences in operating systems, differences in various system APIs, differences in auxiliary hardware, but nothing insurmountable by a development team.

We could nitpick about how one has slightly faster video memory, or another has a slightly faster bus, but none of that is particularly productive. Taking a broad view, they are extremely similar devices.

I don't think the state of affairs has changed much since launch. PS4 has a not-insignificant hardware advantage, but neither is it enough to blow the competition out of the water. The biggest benefit Sony had was their simple architecture, IMO, there's no unfamiliar gotcha's with their system.

To get the most of Xbox One you need to use the ESRAM effectively, though, and done well you can actually achieve higher total memory throughput than the PS4, despite its flat pool of GDDR5. Even with the proprietary Xbox extensions to D3D11 used since launch, taking very tight control of fine-grained memory scenarios is challenging, the Xbox version of D3D12 should make this less difficult and I think we'll see the Xbox gain ground on the PS4 as a result, even if it doesn't produce miracles. The PS4 had a longer runway to begin with, but its got less runway left ahead of it. Xbox also has the Live service with cloud compute, which Sony doens't have, and doesn't have the money or expertise to build anything even a 10th of the scale of Microsoft's infrastructure.

Marketshare-wise Microsoft really needs to push aggressively to gain ground. I've seen numbers that skew as high as 2:1 in favor of playstation worldwide. Its still fairly early though, and the hardware differences are not so big that software can't make up for it. Even Sony admitted that Microsoft's showing at E3 was stonger than their own.

I've got both, I mostly use my PS4 and my wife has one as well so that we can play Destiny together. Right now, the Xbox is a sleeper, waiting for more content that appeals to me. I've deceided to cast my lot in with PS4 this generation as far as cross-platform titles are concerned (I'll buy them on PS4 unless there's a compelling reason not to), but I still want the Xbox exclusives and I also think cloud-powered games are going to be better on Xbox if for no other reason than the services ought to stay up longer on stable infrastructure; When publishers/studios have to role their own game-specific infrastructure, pulling the plug is only a boardroom meeting away.

Hardware-wise, both are technically quite similar. There are slight differences in the performance of individual components, but unlike the previous generation, what works for one is going to work virtually identically on the other.

Currently as a consumer I don't think there is anything to pick between the two. None of the exclusive games are really huge hitters or exclusive enough to force purchase of either console.
I have seen arguments on Twitter over game A having a slightly higher frame rate on console B or console A having a higher resolution but none of these factors should really be enough to detract from enjoying the games.

We could nitpick about how one has slightly faster video memory, or another has a slightly faster bus, but none of that is particularly productive. Taking a broad view, they are extremely similar devices.

^This

I have my own five game rule. For a console to matter to me it needs to have five games that i can't play on any other system i have. The only one that has that many games right now is the WiiU. The PS4 looks like the next one with three games.

I was lucky enough to have both of them

There is no luck involved. They are a luxury device. MANY households have MULTIPLE game consoles. They are not a device for themselves, but they are a means to the end of playing games. If you want to play a particular game, and you have money to buy the parts, then you do so. If the game is an exclusive for a specific platform, and you have the money, you get that console.

Ownership is not exclusive. Many homes have many consoles. I've got six that I can play right now, more that I can dig out if I want to.

There is no luck involved on any of them. There is no 'better' involved on any of them. If I am in the mood to play a specific game, that is the only defining factor.

I don't say "I'm here with some people and we want to play Little Big Planet 2, but I'm not going to because the PS4 has a faster system bus; the PS3 is not the most technically superior device." Nope, I would not care about technical specs, I'll fire up the correct console and play the game I want to play at the moment.

I meant no offense with that statement. I was lucky in the sense that I won the Xbox One in a raffle. I had no intention of buying it otherwise. Maybe I should've been more clear.

Currently as a consumer I don't think there is anything to pick between the two. None of the exclusive games are really huge hitters or exclusive enough to force purchase of either console.
I have seen arguments on Twitter over game A having a slightly higher frame rate on console B or console A having a higher resolution but none of these factors should really be enough to detract from enjoying the games.

We could nitpick about how one has slightly faster video memory, or another has a slightly faster bus, but none of that is particularly productive. Taking a broad view, they are extremely similar devices.

^This

So far exclusives haven't been very good on either console. There's some titles, but not too many. It's still relatively early, early enough that I'm still using my previous gen consoles. Hardware is surprisingly similar. I do hope that there are more exclusives for both consoles. Currently I'm seeing a lot of remakes and continuing of older franchises, which isn't a bad thing necessarily, but I'd also like to see new stuff.

They're both pretty much identical except that one of them decided to throw out one third of their GPU in exchange for a stupid high-speed 32MB buffer, and to save costs using cheap RAM. One of them having 150% (~140% in practice) of the GPU compute power of the other (and more memory accessible per second) means the performance differences can be immense.
I WISH that software just worked on both...
There's a good reason that lots of cross platform games are using 1080p on one platform and 70% 1080p on the other.

The tools for one are way better than the tools for the other too. As a dev, I can definitely pick a favorite

Very true for specific algorithms and tasks. Some things can run faster on one particular piece of hardware.

But in general, that is something the development teams can work around if they choose.

The easy, cheaper approach is to reduce to 70% as you mentioned, but if the teams wanted to invest the time or money in, they could do things differently.

But as for being "better", for consoles it is all about the games.

The Vita was "better" because it had better technical specs. It became "worse" because there were few games relative to the competition.

The Jaguar was "better" as a 64-bit system in 1993 with great technical specs. With few games relative to other systems, it also died.

The PSX was "better" than the PS2 it was based on, but developers didn't want to miss out on the PS2 market. No unique games, the system died.

The DSi was "better" than the DS, but similarly was a small step away from an enormous existing market. Developers didn't want to give up an existing install base of nearly 100M units at the time. There were some small successes with downloaded games. If they were replacing an old dying system some people bought it, but the "XL" introduction of a physically larger device that was more comfortable to adults, and with few exclusive titles, most people passed.

Lots of people complained about the Wii for its low-end technical specs. But it seemed like every home in the world, every old granny to every newborn baby wanted to buy it and play Wii Sports. With over 100 million sold, they still beat both the PS3 and X360 at about 80M each, so even being "worse" could be interpreted as "25% better".

When it comes to game consoles, it is not about the technical specs. It is all about the games people want to play.