(Let's try to keep this as civilized as possible.)
So Sony revealed the PS4 2 days ago. The big shocker to most people including developers is the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. Leaked specs for Xbox 720 put it at 8GB of DDR3. The XBox 720 is at a disadvantage. The whole system is designed around this 8Gb of DDR3 RAM and even includes 32MB of ESRAM to try and compensate for the slow ram. What this means is that Microsoft can't react to Sony. They can't just switch the RAM to GDDR5, not without huge delays. Leaked specs put PS4/720 with equal CPUS, but PS4 also has the GPU advantage. So here's what we will discuss, should Microsoft go ahead with their plans and release the Xbox this way and risk PS4 becoming developers platform of choice? Or should they react to Sony and change up the innards of the next Xbox in exchange for huge delays?
PS4 has more that just a power advantage, it has developer preference behind it. To back this up here is a quote from Jonathan Blow who is developing PS4 exclusive The Witness:
"The real situation is that, because we are a small developer, we only have the ability to launch on a small number of platforms at once. We liked the idea of being on a console, and originally we thought we might be on the PS3 or Xbox 360, but eventually we decided not to target either of those, due to the relatively low system specs and the work required to do the ports. After some more time went by, and our release date drifted further into the future, we realized that the next-generation console launch time might be a good time to release the game. (For a while we were hoping to be out substantially earlier than the next consoles, e.g. right now, so we didn’t start thinking seriously about this until recently).
To launch a high-spec version of the game on a console, it came down to a choice between the next Microsoft console or the next Sony console. There were people at Sony who really liked the game and were keeping in touch with us about it, and so we naturally started going to their PS4 developer events, got a dev kit, and started playing with it. I don’t have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs, and we like the positioning of the PS4 (it’s about games) more than what we perceive Microsoft’s positioning is going to be.
So we just found ourselves doing a PS4 port. And once we are doing that, it is not practical for us also to think about another console port. We were going to be a de facto console exclusive for Sony no matter what. As I mentioned, there are people at Sony who are very interested in The Witness, so they somehow percolated up through the ranks the idea of showing the game in the launch show.
Of course, Sony wants that show to point out things that are going to be exclusive or special to their console. If we are in their show, but next week we turn around and announce “we changed our mind, we are exclusive on Durango forever,” that would be a bit weird. So to be in the show we signed a timed exclusivity for competing consoles. But this was just a formalization of something that was already going to be the case. We like the PS4 and we like the people at Sony we are working with, so it was an easy choice to make the agreement."
