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How will you choose between MS & Sony's new consoles?

Josey Wales

If Sony and Microsoft release both of their new machines later this year how will you decided which machine to get? For the sake of discussion lets just say that they will be released this year.

Will it be brand loyalty? You've bought into the MS Live eco system or PSN and don't want to switch? Will it be the hardware specs of the machine or the launch line up of games? Will it be backwards compatibility? Price?

For me right now I have no idea which I would choose. In this current generation I bought all three (Wii, PS3, 360). I don't think brand loyalty will be a factor for me. In the end I will probably end up with both so I will just have to decide which one first. One important factor will be what Naughty Dog has lined up for the PS4 (or whatever they call it).

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Myrddin

Grumpypants wrote: »

My snes games won't play in my Wii either it's just not an issue.

Well, they do. You just have to buy them again through the VC. Steam on the other hand, has meant nobody has had to repurchase content through the generation changes that pc hardware/consoles go through.

Grumpypants

EnterNow wrote: »

Unlike Steam.

True, but when XBL support is dropped & then your console rrod's a while later...your content is lost. Unlike Steam. Or if things were really fair, because content is tied to your profile...which does carry over to the new console...they can see you've already bought that content for the 360, so will give you the One version for a heavily discounted price. Maybe that'll happen, I doubt it though.

Try install your steam games on a different platform than PC. Let me know if it works.

Otacon

Grumpypants wrote: »

Try install your steam games on a different platform than PC. Let me know if it works.

NTMK

Grumpypants wrote: »

Try install your steam games on a different platform than PC. Let me know if it works.

they work fine on mac and linux when the games are compatable

Grumpypants

Otacon wrote: »

It's the argument that is being made the One and the 360 are different platforms.

ShadowHearth

Grumpypants wrote: »

Try install your steam games on a different platform than PC. Let me know if it works.

Right lol, I'll just leave it at this. No offence, but you completely missing the point.

tuxy

Grumpypants wrote: »

It's the argument that is being made the One and the 360 are different platforms.

The argument is not really about platforms it's about playing old games from years ago on your current gaming system.

I can play games I got on steam in 2003 on the same PC I now use today to play the latest games.

C14N

VinLieger wrote: »

Heres the thing i dont get with the complaints about discs, people have been clamoring for ages about how digital distribution on current gen sucks. Now its hopefully gonna happen with reasonable pricing and download rates yet everyones pissed they cant swap discs?

SOME people have been but a huge number (myself included) haven't said anything because they're perfectly content with their discs. We have no reason to believe pricing will be reasonable either, afaik MS haven't talked about RRPs of their online service. Admittedly if the price does turn out to be very reasonable (as in <€30) then I could see a lot of minds being changed.

Grumpypants wrote: »

steam had no competition for years and still gave great value. That is down to the company being awesome not competition. Xbox will have competition from pc, ps4 and stores

Steam did have competition. It wasn't the only online store (although it was the most comprehensive) and then it still had to compete with the dirt cheap prices of PC games at retail. If I'm a PC gamer, I never have to give a penny to Valve if I don't want to and they don't have control the prices of anything on PC besides their own games.

Saying it has competition from PS4 or PC is not the same. Going and buying the other console for slightly cheaper games is a huge investment for most people. The majority of their users will not be comparing prices on all systems to get the best deal. Even now, most people who own both tend to stick with one most of the time because it's where all their online info and friends are stored.

gizmo wrote: »

Can you imagine how the inevitable "XBox One vs. PS4" threads on these and similar forums will go if one was to charge considerably more for content than the other?

We're a niche market though. Most of their users won't be discussing that sort of thing on a day to day basis.

Grumpypants wrote: »

Yea but could I play your steam games on your pc without your steam log in details? That's what the Xbox allows. You can have 4 accounts and the game will work on all 4 as long as it's on the one console. Which is great for house holds with lots of kids.

Well on my PC I can log into Steam offline (it has my details stored) and then just let anyone play it. If my younger brother comes home from school and suddenly decides to play Half Life 2 before I get back, he just boots up, it logs in as me automatically, and he gets to play the game. Most games (apart from Valve ones) on the Steam store are "common" too so that they're installed on all Windows User Accounts and don't require my Steam details.

wayne040576

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Spot on. They want to be like steam, but they forget, that steam works on any pc or laptop. My steam account already sow 3 different pc's in 6-7 year period.

I already have some games in my steam library that no longer work on my latest machine. In some cases it was the OS upgrade (don't support win7/8). In others, simply having more ram was causing them to crash on startup. The devs no longer supported them and there were no community 'fixes' .

Grumpypants

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Right lol, I'll just leave it at this. No offence, but you completely missing the point.

I'm not missing the point at all. when making comparisons it is only fair to compare like for like.

You can play your pc games from 7 years ago because you are still using a pc. The platform has not changed.

It would be like me saying I can play my 360 games from 7 years ago on my new xbox 360 slim. It is a hardware upgrade but the platform is the same. And I didn't have to rebuy them.

A closer comparison would be if you changed platforms from pc to mac. Bar a handful of games that are cross platform most would require you to buy a mac compatible version.

So when people change platform from 360 to One the only games that will work are ones that are cross platform.

NTMK

wayne040576 wrote: »

I already have some games in my steam library that no longer work on my latest machine. In some cases it was the OS upgrade (don't support win7/8). In others, simply having more ram was causing them to crash on startup. The devs no longer supported them and there were no community 'fixes' .

really? I've only heard of one game (one of the splinter cell games) to be completely incompatible with Win 7 and above

I know that some games can be screwy (battlefront 2 requred something to be plug into the mic jack and Red alert 2 needed a config file chanhe) but they're quite rare in my experience

gizmo

C14N wrote: »

We're a niche market though. Most of their users won't be discussing that sort of thing on a day to day basis.

It was a general example, the same will apply to debate amongst more casual gamers as time goes on. The point being, MS will not allow themselves to become synonymous with expensive games on their digital store if Sony are offering a cheaper alternative. This doesn't account for the possibility of both of them offering the same inflated prices in the absence of retail-based competition however, but that's something we're going to face as we move towards a digital-only future on consoles regardless.

wayne040576

NTMK wrote: »

really? I've only heard of one game (one of the splinter cell games) to be completely incompatible with Win 7 and above

I know that some games can be screwy (battlefront 2 requred something to be plug into the mic jack and Red alert 2 needed a config file chanhe) but they're quite rare in my experience

One example:
Act of War: Direct Action - I could never get it working on my win 7 box. Even modified the registry to fool it into thinking I only had 1GB ram.

NTMK

wayne040576 wrote: »

One example:
Act of War: Direct Action - I could never get it working on my win 7 box. Even modified the registry to fool it into thinking I only had 1GB ram.

ok fair enough its just odd to here of incompatible games thats all

Retr0gamer

Grumpypants wrote: »

So when people change platform from 360 to One the only games that will work are ones that are cross platform.

Which is a benefit Steam has and XBox One doesn't have. Maybe it will with this virtula machine thing MS are doing but again they don't have to guarantee that they will follow through and they have shown historically not to give two figs about backwards compatibility.

Genghiz Cohen

wayne040576 wrote: »

I already have some games in my steam library that no longer work on my latest machine. In some cases it was the OS upgrade (don't support win7/8). In others, simply having more ram was causing them to crash on startup. The devs no longer supported them and there were no community 'fixes' .

But no one enforced that. It is just an unintentional by-product of the hardware market.

Headshot

If ps4 plays its cards right it could be the return of the glory days of the ps2, surely they cant **** it up now

C14N

Grumpypants wrote: »

It's the argument that is being made the One and the 360 are different platforms.

Yeah but they aren't platforms available in parallel. Once the One becomes available, the 360s days are numbered. The One isn't supposed to be available alongside the 360, it's supposed to be an upgrade onto it.

The problem is that this supposed "upgrade" doesn't play any of your previously-owned games. You can keep your 360 of course but it will break someday. Or consider someone who buys a One and didn't have a 360 and then decides they would like to play some classics from a few years back, they can't do that.

On PC, they generally can (case in point, I went and bought Half Life 1 after Half Life 2 and it was no problem despite the fact that it was from a previous generation).

I generally detest the whole rhetoric of "they're changing the consoles and that's bad" and the fogeyism of "back in my day, the industry was much better" but it's hard not to think that right now with Microsoft. Every new "feature" with regards to the games seems to exist purely to take power away from the consumer and make the entire thing more complicated for no reason other than to help them pocket a few extra quid. It's even worse how they condescendingly advertise this stuff as things anyone anywhere who ever existed would ever want.

Despite the fact that MS seem so keen to go after the casuals and the dude-bros who aren't nerds like the rest of us, this seems like the most complicated system I have ever seen. It sounds even worse than the PC which has always successfully kept away the filthy casuals with its complexity. These people aren't going to be as generally dependent on having their high-speed internet on all the time as much as the gamers either (and I don't care about their average of 3mb, that figure can be hugely distorted by millions of incredibly fast connections in South Korea and Scandinavia, give me a median instead)

A lot of people have starting trumpeting the PC horn lately and I do want to point out though that some of the things that are so off-putting about the One have existed on the PC for a long time. We can't have any second hand games at all for example and a lot of games on PC have irritating amounts of DRM (I've been the victim of Ubi's "always on" policy for a few of their games) and that can include Steam if you don't want Steam, with many non-Valve games forcing you to play through the service now.

GTR63

People are still moaning about the lack of backwards compatability. Jesus give it a f*cking rest its been known for weeks and leaked for months.

wayne040576

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

But no one enforced that. It is just an unintentional by-product of the hardware market.

Does it matter?

The end result is the same.

Retr0gamer

GTR63 wrote: »

People are still moaning about the lack of backwards compatability. Jesus give it a f*cking rest its been known for weeks and leaked for months.

Not moaning about it, what my point is that it's one of the advantages of steam. I still can't see any benefit MS's DRM is giving the customer.

ShadowHearth

Grumpypants wrote: »

I'm not missing the point at all. when making comparisons it is only fair to compare like for like.

You can play your pc games from 7 years ago because you are still using a pc. The platform has not changed.

It would be like me saying I can play my 360 games from 7 years ago on my new xbox 360 slim. It is a hardware upgrade but the platform is the same. And I didn't have to rebuy them.

A closer comparison would be if you changed platforms from pc to mac. Bar a handful of games that are cross platform most would require you to buy a mac compatible version.

So when people change platform from 360 to One the only games that will work are ones that are cross platform.

Pc - still on its first generation. Consoles - more then one.
Buy xbox game, not working on Xbox 360 and Xbox one. Buy 360 game, not working on Xbox and Xbox one.
Cross platform examples you give don't work here at all. You comparing apples to oranges. Pc Can't play Xbox or ps3 games, same as Xbox can't play pc and ps3.
when I buy game for steam I can play it on any pc. When I buy it for Xbox 360, I can play it only on 360. If there is Xbox one ported version, then I will have to buy it again.

Genghiz Cohen

wayne040576 wrote: »

Does it matter?

The end result is the same.

I think it does.
One is intentionally screwing you out of functionality.
The other is an accident.

I also don't think using the PC/Mac comparison is a good one either, Mac and PC can run on the same hardware, no consoles do this. Apple give you tools specifically for installing Windows, Sony did that in the early PS3 days and undid it because of security concerns.

Pushtrak

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

I think it does.
One is intentionally screwing you out of functionality.
The other is an accident.

So, new OS gets made causes problems, incidental. New hardware gets released causes problems, intentional. Seems an interesting interpretation.

Grumpypants

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Which is a benefit Steam has and XBox One doesn't have. Maybe it will with this virtula machine thing MS are doing but again they don't have to guarantee that they will follow through and they have shown historically not to give two figs about backwards compatibility.

Well the games you buy this year on One will work on your One in ten years too. The same way your steam games from ten years ago work on your pc.

In saying that I bought Bully last week on steam tried to run it and it crashed as it's not compatible with my pc. Steam and Rockstar have no interest in fixing that.

lets not forget that your steam library only still works because Microsoft builds bc into windows to let them run. Valve are getting a lot if credit for something they have little to do with. And Microsoft are getting slammed even though it's their hard work that ensures your old pc games still work.

ShadowHearth

Grumpypants wrote: »

Well the games you buy this year on One will work on your One in ten years too. The same way your steam games from ten years ago work on your pc.

In saying that I bought Bully last week on steam tried to run it and it crashed as it's not compatible with my pc. Steam and Rockstar have no interest in fixing that.

lets not forget that your steam library only still works because Microsoft builds bc into windows to let them run. Valve are getting a lot if credit for something they have little to do with. And Microsoft are getting slammed even though it's their hard work that ensures your old pc games still work.

GOG.com says hello.

Dyr

ShadowHearth wrote: »

GOG.com says hello.

Stop. You'll blow their peasant minds.

Grumpypants

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Pc - still on its first generation. Consoles - more then one.
Buy xbox game, not working on Xbox 360 and Xbox one. Buy 360 game, not working on Xbox and Xbox one.
Cross platform examples you give don't work here at all. You comparing apples to oranges. Pc Can't play Xbox or ps3 games, same as Xbox can't play pc and ps3.
when I buy game for steam I can play it on any pc. When I buy it for Xbox 360, I can play it only on 360. If there is Xbox one ported version, then I will have to buy it again.

When you buy any pc game it works on any pc and when you buy any 360 game it works on any 360.

You are acting as if a Dell pc and a alienware pc are fundamentally different when they are not. they use the same basic architecture and the same basic operating system this is why your games work.

A 360 is as different from a One as a pc is to a mac.

Otacon

Grumpypants wrote: »

Well the games you buy this year on One will work on your One in ten years too.

What about in 15-20 years, when the Xbox Two comes out and XBL is switched off for the One? Will it be able to do its daily check on the server?

GTR63

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Not moaning about it, what my point is that it's one of the advantages of steam. I still can't see any benefit MS's DRM is giving the customer.

But you just know that Sony are going to do the same thing in terms of the 2nd hand Policies and likely are going to charge people again for their own cloud/gaikai based backwards compatability too.