A good read.  Many important points hit, such as the limits of technology spurring on amazing creativity vs high tech allowing more lazy shiny.  What was technology when electricity or the light bulb or telephone were made possible?  How many years later, and we are excited about a few more polygons etc over what the prev. gen gave us?  I totally get this guys point of view.

A friend of mine asked me yesterday, "what does it offer me over my ps3?"  And really, what does it truly offer thats new and fresh?  I guess, not a lot other than software support over the long term when they decide to drop the not good enough ps3.

Now, I'm not saying there won't be stellar gaming experiences to be enjoyed on the system...because of course there will be.  But, is it really that much better than we have experienced in the past because of greater power?  Or will it be more of the same goodness with a shinier cover because devs will be looking at ways to make the games look better, rather than take what power they had and find new ways to utilize it or find fascinating new ways to design games to make up for the fact that they cannot go any further down the road of pretty?

A good read indeed

maybe compared to the PS3, but the 360 wasn't anywhere near as developer-friendly as the PS4 is going to be and the next Xbox.

If the 360 weas so easy to developer then Microsoft wouldn't be siwtching architectures.

Yes, some studios suffer major loses, other studios just close altogether, but go as far as to say that the video game industry WILL eventually perish is a very bold statement. Console sales have only been rising generation per generation, and I honestly don't see video games dying.

Creativity thrives under limitations. People who love games understand this implicitly, since the best players find the most creative ways to succeed within the confines of the rules. The Great Train Robbery is a masterpiece not in spite of its limitations but because of them. So if David Cage doesn’t think he can produce an emotional work of art with a PlayStation 3 and an eight-figure budget, maybe he shouldn’t be in the art-making business.

Expanding the technological capabilities of our game machines is not inherently bad, but treating new tech as a magic bullet is a self-destructive delusion (if a familiar one). The reason that so many games suck is not because the technology is too modest. The reason that so many games suck is because so many games suck. Making art is hard. No microchip changes that.

And yet Sony’s developers insist on the myth of “more.” More polygons and more gigabytes because surely this time, they will lead to the promised land of creative expression. In practice, this dogma hasn’t done much to improve games. Quite the opposite. As production budgets balloon and the cost of entry shuts out independent voices, the worship of “more” is likely to be the ruination of console gaming as we know it. The industry’s arms race with itself simply is not sustainable. Yet here’s Sony, blithely promising to build a bigger gun. They’d better watch out—the recoil’s a bitch.

Entirely depends on the vision of the creator. Better specs means more freedom to do persue dreams and goals of creators without constraints. This is why devs from teams like Epic are just so giddy about specs of the PS4. It's dev friendly design and plenty of power to do what they want to do. The important thing to understand is just because there is a lot of power, you don't have to use all of it. It just removes limits for those are affected. This is what sony was explaining at the event. Removing limits/boundaries for creation. 

I mean if you check the previous few posts you will notice how the creator of Witness, needed the extra power to make his game a reality. This is why, as he explains, the team skipped the last gen as well as even the wiiu.

No, I'm sorry, but you're wrong.  It's a sophomoric and bitter piece.  Read it again and note all the hyperbole and insults.  Note all the strawman arguments and false information.  That's not professional at all.

As for the idea that improving your hardware hurts gaming, that's ridiculous.  It's like saying we should take brushes away from painters and give them pieces of grass because it will make their paintings better.  It's just sophistry.  Not even Nintendo believes that, as every single device they've made has been more powerful than previous models.

Even then, the entire point of Sony's presentation wasn't "moar power", it was about removing artificial barriers.  Are the artists themselves, the developers, complaining about the Cell being replaced by normalized PC architecture?  Are they angry that more RAM lets them do what they want?  If so, then I'll listen to his point, but I haven't heard anything like that.

The writer just wants gaming to fit his vision, that's all, and no other.  He doesn't want explosions, he doesn't want FPS, he doesn't want anything that he won't enjoy to exist.  And that's sad and hateful.  I loathe people like that.

The bolded part is pretty much his main argument, he does says that "console gaming as we know" will change, but that is already happening or did you miss the 'social' tone of the conference, or the ammount of investments of big studios on social games. For good or bad, things are changing, now, tell me again how these last lines of the article are wrong.

That's a great thing to say. But, high-end, amazing specs aren't needed for imagination or creativity. That's where it goes wrong.

The Wii was rejected, because publishers couldn't simply outspend their competitors. Since the ceiling for graphics wasn't as high as on other systems, it meant that they had to compete with Nintendo on creativity and imagination. That's the hard way to sell games. It's much easier to sell an average game with pretty graphics.

There will always be technical limitations. Trust me, developers will want more power in the not so distant future. They always do.