I didn't want to get into this, but you are wrong. When coding for a game you need to know the system you are coding for in and out to get the most out of the hardware. Now every studio isn't large enough to have multiple teams work on different platforms. That means some devs do indeed have intimate knowledge of both sytems innards. If the studio is large enough to have a seperate teams working on each platform, like someone said earlier, there is a team that goes between both to confirm parity. What about these indies making games for both platforms? A lot of these indies are very small teams, some are only a couple people. Your argument doesn't work very well, neither does the Take 10 dev's. The people he's crying about are the Neogaf people. A lot of those people are industry people who know their shit. He shouldn't be telling anyone to STFU.

I have to say that your argument is not very solid.  There are all types of developers and to think that every developer is on the same level means you have not developed software.  People would put Naught Dog as one of the premiere developers out there because of their ability to harness the capabilities of the Cell including Sony Santa Monica.  Do people remember when the gen first started with the PS3 and 360.  Where Sony had to send IBM people to Epic and other high profile companies to get them up to speed on how to program to the Cell.  Do people remember how long it took for top 3rd parties to ramp up on programming to the PS3 so that games started to either meet or even exceed the 360 version.

Do people forget comments from Carmack and Valve Gabe Newell in the early days about the PS3 arch.  So early impression for a more complex system is always met with resistance because its more complex.  Developers like to go to the platform and support the platform with the least resistance because it does not take them out of their comfort zone.

So when you hear something from an anon developer you have no clue exactly what that developer do. Does he work on animation, game content, network or game engine physics etc.  You do not know if he heard from a friend or just someone who doesn't want to take the time to learn the techniques to gain optimum performance from one system to the next.  Even from the edge article it appears that its the software drivers from MS that is behind which I can see that being the case.  MS system is definitely more complex to work with and thus MS will need to make sure their drivers gain the most from the system without the developers having to access the low level hardware in order to gain performance.  The ESRAM is something developers will definitely need to manage to reach peak performance because they just cannot throw everything in memory, instead they will have to manage what is stored within memory for the scene being displayed and constantly swap in and out textures and other stuff.  Tilled resources probably will help out a lot in this area.

As for the people on Neogaf, lets not generalize and say a lot of them know their stuff.  If going by the comments i would say you have about the same people on this site then on Gaf who actually know their stuff.  One thing for sure is that you do not have a lot of people on any site that knows the difference between coding for the PS4 and X1.

How is my argument not solid? Especially when you fail to prove otherwise. Why talk about coding when we are talking about a dev's knowledge of hardware? Do you really think a game jurno is going to talk to an artist instead of a coder about specs? How was I generalizing? The people on NeoGaf are very knowledgeable. A lot more knowledgeable than the people on this site. There are a good amount of insiders there. This is proven week in and week out when gaming sites and publications are citing users fron NeoGaf about rumors and such. Again with the coding.We weren't talking about just coding, it was being used to prove a point. You're reaching for something that isn't there.

I thought it was quite well known already that the PS4 development environment is nothing like the PS3, and has been stated as being better than the XboxOne development environment. To me it seems that Cerny got in early, gathered all the intel on what was awful about the PS3 (which is pretty much detailed on the internet already)... and fixed it. While Ms seemed to have left it quite late, made the hardware more complicated (maybe because they didnt want to risk GDDR5 memory issues) and have a worse development environment. I don't think there is anything to argue about here. Can MS improve their systems, yep... can Sony continue to improve theirs... yep. MS might have a bit more wiggle room to improve theirs if its really as bad as people say, but ultimately that gap is still going to be small in terms of performance catch up.

The question will be what types of performance differences we will see. Who knows.. Sony had a worse console to develop on with the PS3, but ultimately developed and published a better and wider range of exclusives, while MS started off strong and dropped then console. Xbox360 was no doubt the better console to develop for - for 3rd parties, but ultimately MS dropped it in the last few years and doesnt even have a good set of launch titles to show for dropping it.

If they are equal in performance, I would still say Sony will do a better job of releasing a wider diverse range of games on the platform. While Sony's 3rd party studios are larger and seemingly better placed to release the better looking/running games on the platform. MS will show interest for a few years and then get bored.. unfortunately that's what MS is like. That's what they were like on PC. If the PS4 is substantially more powerful it will just make the whole situation even worse.

How is my argument not solid? Especially when you fail to prove otherwise. Why talk about coding when we are talking about a dev's knowledge of hardware? Do you really think a game jurno is going to talk to an artist instead of a coder about specs? How was I generalizing? Some of the people on NeoGaf are very knowledgeable. A lot more knowledgeable than most of the people on this site. There are a good amount of insiders there. This is proven week in and week out when gaming sites and publications are citing users fron NeoGaf about rumors and such. Again with the coding.We weren't talking about just coding, it was being used to prove a point. You're reaching for something that isn't there.

The question will be what types of performance differences we will see. Who knows.. Sony had a worse console to develop on with the PS3, but ultimately developed and published a better and wider range of exclusives, while MS started off strong and dropped then console. Xbox360 was no doubt the better console to develop for - for 3rd parties, but ultimately MS dropped it in the last few years and doesnt even have a good set of launch titles to show for dropping it.

If they are equal in performance, I would still say Sony will do a better job of releasing a wider diverse range of games on the platform. While Sony's 3rd party studios are larger and seemingly better placed to release the better looking/running games on the platform. MS will show interest for a few years and then get bored.. unfortunately that's what MS is like. That's what they were like on PC. If the PS4 is substantially more powerful it will just make the whole situation even worse.

Ok maybe I should have stated it different.  You post seems to make assumptions that all developers are equal.  You presented an opinion that indie and other devs who do multiple development work also have the time to learn two very different complex systems.  My case is that all developers are not equal.  If you went by the PS3 gen, there were many developers who could not grasp the Cell processor and their games struggled on the PS3 compared to the 360.  Did that mean that the PS3 was a weaker system than the 360, no.  It means the developer experience and capabilities were not up to the task at hand.  

As for who game jornos talk to, I have no clue.  I do know they like a story and they are willing to take info from any source that is willing to give it.  Making the assumption that game jornos would only talk to game engine designers is suspect when those same jornos do not even tell you what the developers do.