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jarrod on 30 November 2009
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Noobie said:
jarrod said:
Launch aligned comparisons are inherently disingenuous for competitive platforms. You really just can't divorce a platform's performance from the context of what was happening in the market and industry when that actually happened. Launch aligned N64 also slaughtered PS1 it's first 3 years, yet that didn't mean much in the end.

A 360 launching in Q4 2006 would've had an HD-DVD drive, upspecced chips, more RAM and launch games like Gears of War, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Oblivion and Blue Dragon. A PS3 launching in Q4 2006 would've had a DVD drive, no RSX (it'd have used a repurposed low-SPU CELL instead, as was the original plan), probably less RAM and launch games like Ridge Racer 6, COD2, Gun, THAW and (maybe) Genji (1).

If XBOX360 had launched with PS3 with HD DVD, then it would have costed more.. n it wouldn;t have got the benefit of userbase for multiplat games n i think it would have costed MS more to get time exclusivity.. 

I think XBOX reigned one yr without any direct competition.. n its a common thing that when there is no competition u benefit more... Moreover XBOX would not have gained much in terms of cost reduction cuz XBOX was already using simple DDR2 RAM, Power Processor which was not much different from already released Power PCs so the cost was already quite low... many ppl bough XBOX cuz their friends were already on it so peer advantage which XBOX had would not have been there if it had launched with PS3..

So in my humble opinion they would have lost much more than gained anything... 

360 getting heldback a year probably wouldn't have altered the spec too much, you're right... it'd probably have just meant faster clocked chips, maybe a bigger framebuffer (say 16MB rather than 10MB) and a little more overall RAM (say 640-768MB).  The biggest expense would've been the HD-DVD upgrade, but then the cost of that would be mitigated by an extra year of waiting out the chipset costs... I think it could've launched at the same upper pricepoint (ie: $399 Pro).  Toshiba likely would've subsidized the drive cost even, I'm sure now they wished they'd pushed harder.

Also, 360's userbase isn't really why it's become the defacto base for multiplatform games, it's Microsoft's amazing tools and the chipset's general ease of use.  All of which would've been massively improved upfront if they'd had an extra year to ramp up.  Not to mention XBL, which has really been the platform's selling point among the core gamer community imo.

And let's not beat around the bush, 360 certainly had "direct competition" in 2005/2006.