I encourage those of you of #gaming debating the PS4 vs Xbox One to read this post that was written by a Redditor: [quote] I personally find some of the arguments against the X1 hilarious. Yes, the requirement for being online to play is bad. You should dislike that. But people then go on tangents about how 'the hardware sucks compared to the PS4', etc. Let me start off by saying that I am a professional game developer with quite a bit of console experience. Most of the people attacking the X1's hardware specifications have absolutely no knowledge of what they're talking about. Hardware-wise, the X1 and the PS4 are quite similar. The largest difference that stands out to me is that the PS4 uses GDDR5 whilst the X1 uses DDR3. Many of the rants I've seen have showcased this as 'evidence' that the PS4 is superior. I find this funny, since to me it showcases that they don't know what GDDR5 is. GDDR5 is Graphics RAM. The main distinction is that GDDR5 has much higher bandwidth than DDR3 (as that is needed on graphics cards due to large textures and framebuffers needing to be copied), but this comes at a price: GDDR5 also has far higher latency than DDR3. Rambus' RDRAM suffered back in the early 2000's from the same thing - high bandwidth, high latency compared to DDR. It lost that war. I worry that Sony is making another misstep in replicating what will be high load-hit-store costs on the x86 that existed on the PowerPC (for both the 360 and the PS3, but worse on the latter). Now, having GDDR5 is useful when shared memory is involved, so this is also intruiging, since it means that textures and framebuffers can be passed quickly via DMA. This is a lesson they appeared to have learned from the PS3 (which had a segregated model, much to everyone's chagrin). I expect that the X1 will be GPU bound, and the PS4 will be CPU bound. Due to that, I predict that both will operate roughly the same. An intelligent developer will be able to optimize for both, a task that was nearly impossible with the 360 and the PS3 (due to the PS3's very peculiar SPU setup). On the user side, one of the reasons that /r/gaming seems to dislike the X1 is that they don't realize that they're not the X1's target playerbase. The X1 is being marketed towards youth who play games, casual game players, and people who want to use the X1 for multimedia purposes (as a HTPC of sorts). The PS4 is being marketed towards more general gamers. This is no different than the 360 and the PS3. There is also a good reason for Microsoft wanting to limit the ability to share/resell games... ... because game developers want them to. Microsoft has always been far more friendly with developers than Sony has been, from working with them to the development toolkits. Microsoft, just like Sony, makes most of their money on game licensing and not on the consoles themselves, so this is perfectly reasonable from their point of view, and enough people are likely to buy the X1 for it to be justified to them. This well-reasoned argument by TotalBiscuit on YouTube emphasizes the developer's position on this, and Microsoft is only paying heed to their actual customer (the developer; you aren't the customer, you're customer's customer to them). Used game sales and game-sharing does hurt developers, as much as /r/gaming won't admit that. Unlike music, movies, cars, etc, games don't have multiple revenue streams after purchase. The music industry continues to make money via concerts and royalties. The movie industry continues to make money via rentals, DVDs, royalties, syndication, etc. Cars break down. Games... don't. Games last virtually forever, and the only point at which the developer makes money is when they're sold. There are income models that get around that (MMO, free-to-play), but they aren't ideal in every situation (and indeed I dislike FTP). Companies like GameStop are quite literally stealing profit from developers, particularly when their business model is to convince people to buy used instead of new (they do this because they make far more profit on used games than new games). This is why Microsoft has been pushed by developers to support this model - because the game industry is hurting (and they really are, one only needs to look at all the terminations recently). More interestingly, this isn't really any different than PC gaming. Do you use Steam? There really isn't game sharing/used games there. You don't even have physical media for most PC games anymore. Microsoft is only following in Valve's footsteps, here. Most media is moving towards digital formats, where restrictions on used media is easy and will be implemented. The former is what consumers want, the latter is going to be implemented at the want of content-makers. Welcome to capitalism. [/quote] [url]http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fyjgr/regarding_xbox_one_and_allegations_of_voterigging/[/url]