Gabe Newell favors Xbox

[DonFerrari]

shikamaru317 said:

DonFerrari said:

Well even before we discover that, considering they made the demo for PS5 so it would be strange if they didn't praise Sony for the system as well.

Would be good if Gabe gave his reason, even if it simple "the specs are higher, GP, play anywhere, etc" even though that is probably what he thinks even without saying.

The issue with Tim/Epic wasn't so much that they praised PS5, just praising PS5 is fine, the problem was that they did like 5 or 6 different interviews praising it, each basically saying the exact same things about PS5, and the only time they mentioned Xbox Series X was to say "oh yeah, it could also run that demo" after they got called out by 3rd party tech websites and such for implying that only PS5 could handle that Unreal 5 tech demo. As a 3rd party publisher, it always seemed like they were lacking objectivity in this console war (especially considering the fact that far more MS studios use Unreal engine than Sony studios), and then when the news broke that Sony had acquired a portion of Epic Games, it became pretty clear why they didn't seem objective. 

Of course, Gabe Newell isn't really all that objective either. He used to work for Microsoft (though I don't think they parted on the best of terms), Xbox releases alot of their games on Steam now and offers crossplay with Steam on some games I think. Of course, there was a brief partnership in gen 7 between Valve and Sony with some kind of plans to release steam on PS3, but I believe that deal fell through with Steam never actually releasing on PS3. And Gabe Newell also criticized Windows 10 Store quite alot when Microsoft first released it as a competitor to Steam, so I guess he could be objective in this case when he says he prefers Xbox Series. 

I also found it odd that they had almost day in and day out someone from Epic praising the SSD, I even commented that it was just copy and paste from the last speech someone from Epic had talked.

On the "it run on XSX", well that was pretty obvious since it is listed on UE5 support (even smartphones are). What the other sites are missing is that the demo the way it was show really could only run at PS5 at that moment, to run on XSX it would need some scaling back on streaming due to the over 2x SSD spec difference (and sure could be scaled up for GPU/CPU demand), same for those "that same demo is running on a PC weaker than PS5 and with slow SSD" but that notebook was just showing a recorded video.

I don't think this answer from Gabe is because he isn't objective, from technical perspective everything so far leads to conclusion Xbox is stronger with the caveats of SSD impact and the sound chip that we will need quite some time to see the effects. I'm just a little sad MS didn't took the chance to really show that power in any of the two shows so far.