During the course of the last year, people have revelled in the disparity between the XB1 and the PS4. This has mainly mainfested itself as resolution differences. Then, after we had word of the new freed up SKU (because of the removal of Kinect) things appeared to improve, with some titles matched on both consoles. There was still a difference in some titles but definitely less than at the beginning of this generation.
But then we started seeing titles that many believed should defnitely look better on the PS4, Destiny bringing it to a head with claims of forced parity. This was dismissed simply because the argument took into consideration that the 360/PS3 versions also existed, which was brought into the debate when Bungie spoke of 'parity', but I think it wasn't quite as clean cut as that. Something is going on the background that none of us are privy to and never will be.
Major publishers are fighting for that market and resolution has become the defacto selling point for many people (rightly or wrongly). So what has this got to do with FIFA v PES? This is what I believe is happening and I think we'll see more of it as the gap grows larger: EA are a huge publisher with close ties with Microsoft and so have been cutting back on the PS4 titles in order to reach a semblance of parity. Meanwhile, Konami have taken the opportunity to put clear water between them and EA, so revitalising a once loved franchise by offering better visuals on the PS4 while lowering the resolution on the XB1 so they can use the full feature set of their Fox engine. EA cannot afford to let this continue and will at some point have to push their engine harder. The new PES won't sell anywhere near as well as FIFA but it will make people take note and slowly but surely the PES franchise could start eating up EAs dollars.
This will set an interesting presedent going forward because many devs won't want to look last gen in the face of competition. They will have a choice: Go all out to produce the best version for the PS4 and hit a potential market of twice the install base (as of right now. Clearly it will grow) OR risk annoying the bigger install base and losing momentum to a better looking game. Yes, they may well and probably will annoy the smaller install base if they make the PS4 version better, but from a business standpoint, it's better to annoy the few than to annoy the many and money talks in this industry.
The PS5 Exists.
