I think it's both. I think the sort of people who like COD etc actually are impressed by tech specs and would be deterred from buying say an Xbox if it was common knowledge that the PS4 was much more powerful. I'm impressed by graphics as well, habit of a lifetime from watching them develop over the last thirty odd years. I think there's a lot of posturing about how graphics don't matter when actually they do quite a bit.

I think there's a lot of posturing about how graphics don't matter when actually they do quite a bit.

Yeah they do matter, but some are more obsessed with the numbers than others.

I want to see more stuff going on in games in the next gen, the 'living cities' in this current generation are pretty sparse really.

Of course, new pretties are exciting. However, how many frames per second per teraflop doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can appreciate how some people find this interesting - much in the same way some people find stamp collecting or trainspotting interesting - but it's not for me.

Dunno if you did that on purpose, but you know that the number of people in your sparse cities relies on those numbers, right?

"Like in cricket, the ultimate result of a stroke is more important than how it is played"

Tying a story around it as well makes games better

The sounds and visuals are only really a small part of it, but do make the biggest impact.

Dunno if you did that on purpose, but you know that the number of people in your sparse cities relies on those numbers, right?

Not always - I find sports games and the like that force you to have a 'career' and sort out advertising and stuff most tedious.

You can even argue that - as consoles keep pushing for more ROAR POWAAA - publishers are spending on their time on the shiny and not enough time on the "game" bit of the game, so better consoles actually make games worse. For instance, since FF7 the better the game has looked the worse it has been.

I think there's plenty in the current-gen (or last gen, if you're me or TheVision) line-up that would make that a tricky argument, though.

Yes. I mean, graphics are pretty enough now (textures, polygon count etc), but it would be nice to have better physics, swarms, crowds etc. Dig?

Nor me at least not to that level of detail. But I seem to recall that some people's decision to choose a PS3 over a 360 was influenced by the fact that it was said to be the more powerful machine. Perhaps not unreasonably they concluded that it might have greater potential. If I had to choose between two consoles with a similar-looking launch line up then, other things being equal, I'll choose the one that is more powerful because it might mean that I'll eventually get to play better games on it.

I don't think it would be very good for either company's machine if it was massively less powerful, in terms of numbers, than the other. I think it would harm sales.

I think whoever blinks first seems to get the best headstart. Look at the PS2 vs Xbox, 360 vs PS3. The PS2 and 360 were actually less powerful than their main competitor, but ended up selling the most.

Yeah, I know that would need a more powerful console Grim... I assume that would be done by th emain processor though rather than a ZOFMG graphics chip.

I think whoever blinks first seems to get the best headstart. Look at the PS2 vs Xbox, 360 vs PS3. The PS2 and 360 were actually less powerful than their main competitor, but ended up selling the most.

Another good example is megapixels on a digital camera - important, sure, but nowhere near as important as the general public believe.

For the first time in about 25 years, i'm not sure i'm going to bother having a "current" console next time round. I have a PS3 that I never turn on and was only ever used for GT5, and an Xbox that only ever gets used for BF3.
The only thing that would make me buy is a new proper good multiplayer FPS, other than that i'm really not fussed.

Even if you profess not to care about the 'numerical metrics for performance' if you want games with more realistic/populated worlds or whatever even with the level of pretty you're already used to then the power of the consoles need to increase.

No, but the sensor performance is far more important. That's an example of the public focussing* on the wrong thing, not an example of numbers not mattering.

*heh.

I think that's a terrible example. For one, I think most people now understand that megapixels aren't everything. For two, even when I was in full effect, the megapixel thing was an example of the a technical product marketed to technically illiterate consumers by representing performance with a single (misleading) figure. Consoles have never been sold like that. MS didn't go on stage at E3 in 2005 and talk about fill rates. Sony didn't fill billboards with GPU architecture diagrams. I'd argue that almost all console marketing has, very reasonably, focused on experience (HD gaming, 3D gaming, motion controls, specific exclusive games) rather than specs.

People don't buy specs (barring a small number of anomalies); they buy experiences. Specs underpin the experience. It's all related.

Consoles will be more powerful and be able to handle more stuffs, for sure. If two consoles are released within 3 months of each other, say, I'd be surprised if there was a significant, or even noticeable, difference in the performance. The success of either will be more down the games available, and a killer app. Even though the PS3 is two years younger (so more powerful in terms of numbers and stuff) than the 360, it's been less successful than the 360 over its lifetime according to Dimrill's graph. So i'm led to conclude that the numbers don't really matter too much.

What? Sony went on about cell architecture plenty when they were releasing the PS3.

Someone upthread mentioned the first-to-market advantage. I think this has been particularly significant in this generation of consoles, as this is when online gaming came of age. If three of your friends all have a 360, you're more likely to choose 360 over PS3 to play with them. Hence early sales have a force multiplier effect down the road. I wonder how much of the 360's later-in-life upswing can be traced to this. It's certainly not down to exclusive games -- the PS3 and Wii have much more substantial roster of exclusives, to my mind.

Someone upthread mentioned the first-to-market advantage. I think this has been particularly significant in this generation of consoles, as this is when online gaming came of age. If three of your friends all have a 360, you're more likely to choose 360 over PS3 to play with them. Hence early sales have a force multiplier effect down the road. I wonder how much of the 360's later-in-life upswing can be traced to this. It's certainly not down to exclusive games -- the PS3 and Wii have much more substantial roster of exclusives, to my mind.

Well, the history of console development has no shortage of massive belmers.

I think whoever blinks first seems to get the best headstart. Look at the PS2 vs Xbox, 360 vs PS3. The PS2 and 360 were actually less powerful than their main competitor, but ended] up selling the most.

a technical product marketed to technically illiterate consumers by representing performance with a single (misleading) figure. Consoles have never been sold like that.

...and how many will stick to Xbox now they've heavily invested in cheezoz, Live Accounts, have MS points still to spend. Microsoft would have to do a proper belmer to fuck things up for themselve at the next stage.

Will your existing XBLAH games work on a new Xbox console is an interesting question to consider.

Xbla being a .net layer means they could in theory build a bytecode translator If the hardware is different enough to prevent normal running, so long as the libraries are still there.

Dreamcast vs PS2

Xbla being a .net layer means they could in theory build a bytecode translator If the hardware is different enough to prevent normal running, so long as the libraries are still there.

If the Xbox 720 uses x86, there's already a complete .Net virtual machine for it, for obvious reasons. I think that makes XBLAH games porting trivial, or possibly even reduces it to no porting work required -- Dave could clarify.

The processor architecture will inevitably be different. PowerPC is a dead end; Microsoft can only choose x86 (logical) or ARM (wacky and fairly unlikely). So disk-based games won't work automatically, we may or may not get backwards compatibility based on software patches, as with the 360 and the after-launch PS3s.