Yeah, and I can see why they have to do things differently than Sony or Nintendo because of that. If the whole service turned into XBLIG - a few gems hidden amongst a mountain of fart apps - it would be a catastrophe.

It's just that lately there have been a whole lot of Kickstarters offering PS4/Vita/Wii U versions as stretch goals. The latest being Liege, whose developer will port it to PS4 and Vita (and I hear he's talking to Nintendo about the Wii U as well) if he can hit a mere $52k. I wonder if we have ever seen console games that were developed for $50k. That's pretty exciting stuff, and it feels like MS is way behind the curve on this.

We'll see what happens.  The majority of kickstarters fail.  Hence one of the reasons why publishers exist.

I know a lot of people see Microsoft's requirement for publishers for Xbox LIVE Games as a bad thing, but I think it is intended in the best interest of the developer.  Look at the landscape, and look at what software developers that existed in 1980 are still around today.  Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle, and Activision.   Microsoft has seen a lot of development studios for both games and applications come and go.  Most game publishing in the 1980's and even the 1990's was self-published.  The majority of those companies failed or sold out to Activision or EA.  A huge vaccum is created when an independent developer fails, it isn't quite the same if they go through a publisher because there is still an entity that exists that can act on behalf of the developers by providing updates and support.

Like I said we'll see what happens.  If it's a boon for Sony it's a boon for them, but it could end up coming back to haunt them.

For Microsoft's part I think they just need to explain why a publisher is important to them. 

A person works at Burger King, yet prefers eating Jack in the Box. Does that make him bad for the company?

And again. How does that in any way mean the guy prefers the PS4 over the Xbox One?

I for one am appalled. I expected much better journalism from kpopstarz.com

Told you? lmfao. What are you trying to come off as some sort of insider? NIce try.

ESRAM is complicated when you realize that PS4 doesn't need it. 

Just ask devs this question. Do they prefer PS4s ram setup or Xbox Ones?  99% will say PS4 as it is pretty straightforward.

Yes told me and I don't care if you believe me or not, this won't change anything.

As you probably have close to zero knowledge on programming and low-hardware-stuff you don't know which is complicated or not.

But either way, both have a special memory-architecture devs have to deal with. And by now I only heard of devs praising the PS4 which are developing PS4-games and not Xbone-games. Perhaps except Jonathan Blow, whose twitter-account is filled with ms-hate.

But let's not discuss this further, time will tell us :) Easy, man :)

It's pretty straightforward. 

PS4 = 8GB fast GDDR5 RAM.
Xbox One = 8GB slow DDR3 RAM + fast 32mb ESRAM.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the ESRAM is there to try and fix the slow DDR3 RAM. You're right that I don't have programming knowledge or anything like that. So how far ESRAM goes to negate that issue I don't know. All I know is that the PS4 doesn't have that issue to begin with. I think its safe to say that the Xbox One's setup will never be equal to the PS4s in terms of RAM and bandwidth. To even come close to that they'll need to do more work. Xbox One is complicated when being compared to the PS4. If I remember correctly, developers prefer simple and familiar. 

We had this discussion too often, VGKing, and I don't want to argue again with all my points, I am weary of it now. Let time speak.

So you disagree that the PS4s RAM setup is superior for game development? Do you think the Xbox One's RAM setup is better?