| Dr.Henry_Killinger said: If the previous gens (6 & 7) are any indicator, hardware arguments are more common the closer the two competitors are in marketshare, although it will also diminish over time. |
With the 6th gen, both the GC and the XB were pretty clear in their ability to produce better visuals. The GC was somewhat hobbled by Nintendo's decision to use mini optical discs with limited storage, but the games still looked better. But regardless of the technical gaps, the sales percentages were so far apart that none of that seemed to have had any effect on the PS2.
I'm not predicting that the PS4 will run away with the majority percentage, even though it is currently tracking as though it will, but if so, there won't be much point in arguing hardware advantages if the XB1 is selling half of what the PS4 is. People will still argue, with the contrarian arguments coming from the XB1 fanbase, but it really won't matter in that scenario.
The 7th gen was in many ways the most interesting hardware generation in that the expanded audience of non-traditional players determined market share percentages, and also in that the platform that was looking like a poor third in the beginning, legitimately managed to flip a 180 in recovery.
As you were saying, it's probably because sales between the PS3 and XB360 were so close that hardware continued to be such a point of debate and to be fair, the two platforms used very different architectures to achieve similar results in most cases. After a few years, memory distribution, processors, etc. really didn't matter so much as how those resources were used to produce end results did, although geeks continued to debate hardware rather than just differences in multiplatform titles.
