Folks, get an Xbox One instead. Better games at launch, no Blue Light of Death, no ugly design and no ugly controller. The PS4 is just an over rexpensive Ouya. Microsoft were the ones who invented online gaming and servers. Microsoft were the ones who revolutionized FPS on consoles and they were the ones who made the easiest platform to make games to. Game developers constantly complained about making games for the PlayStation 2. They needed to, because it was the biggest console around, but it was apparently a pain in the ass to develop for. Sony simply didn’t care about making it easy on developers – they knew that if their system was popular enough, it wouldn’t matter how hard it was to develop for. They were right. But with the Xbox, Microsoft made sure that developing for the system was as simple as possible. The company made it like developing games for the PC, which has always been the easiest platform to work with (and to port from). Id Software ported over Doom 3 and added in console-exclusive features, and Valve even put its extremely popular Half-Life 2 onto the Xbox (even if it didn’t run all that well).
Microsoft were the ones who made the West more important to the industry. During the 1990s, there was a mentality that Japanese game developers were significantly better than those based in Europe or the US. That was likely due, in part, to the fact that all of the console makers were based out of Japan – they shared more with their own countrymen, giving them earlier access to early development kits while massive US companies like EA were forced to purchase retail hardware from Japan and reverse-engineer it in order to make their games. Simply put, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega didn’t always play nice with foreign developers. But once the Xbox hit the scene, they had to. Suddenly, there was a large American console on the market, made by a company with a history of supporting developers. It opened the door for a number of studios to start making games on consoles that otherwise would have stuck to PC development, and led to a massive spike in the number of US and European publishers making AAA games.
