microsoft doubled their original xbox sales, while the ps3 didn't match ps2

yes, the ps3 sells a bit more when comparing with the xbox360 but the trend is better for microsoft

Well of course, most of their marketing occured in America where people will generally pick the cheaper of a similar yet well marketed product. Microsoft got the third parties to be side with them equally to Sony so jumping ship wasn't really that hard. Question? How do you achieve 150 million in sales when another company is shaving gamers off of your marketshare? Together they both have 170 gamers between them. Put those together and you have the PS2 numbers and nearly the Xbox sales. By the end of this generation the numbers between the two brands will have gone over last gens total combined between the two.

Not sure why are some people worked up about all this...of course MS will say they have miracle engineers who will make their hardware fly after that EDGE article.

What exactly is their PR expected to say after such lines as:

- difference in performance between the consoles (described) as “significant” and “obvious.”

- without optimisation for either console, a platform-agnostic development build can run at around 30FPS in 1920×1080 on PS4, but it’ll run at “20-something” FPS in 1600×900 on Xbox One. “Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM"

- Xbox One is lagging behind in this regard (drivers) – Microsoft “has been late on their drivers and that has been hurting them,” said one source. Another described Xbox One’s graphics drivers less charitably as “horrible”


Still, what's most interesting from the article is actually this:

One source even suggested that enforcing parity across consoles could become a political issue between platform holders, developers and publishers. They said that it could damage perceptions of a cross platform title, not to mention Xbox One, if the PS4 version shipped with an obviously superior resolution and framerate; better to “castrate” the PS4 version and release near-identical games to avoid ruffling any feathers.

This claim was later countered by a contact at a different studio. “It would be totally fine for us to make one version prettier without any political difficulties but it usually doesn’t make financial sense,” they said, “unless it’s a very simple tweak.”

Lol, you got me wrong. I am not blaming MS for the bad business decisions made by Sony, on the contrary MS made a lot of very good decision with the Xbox 360 while Sony was getting arrogant thinking that most PS2 players will buy the PS3 and new players will buy the PS3. That is the advantage of coming from behing. Microsfot learned from the Xbox to launch the Xbox 360. Now Sony learned from their past mistake for the PS3 and are now launching a $400 PS4 vs a $ 600 PS3. I am eager to see how this war will turn out. 

Sony still can argue more bang for the buck with what it is.  PS+ is less expensive than Gold.  I saw them doing this actually, because they argue they are cheaper.  And they definitely did see what they were leaving on the table moneywise.   Next up is going to be the Gakkai streaming, which should prove to be interesting.  Will see how it goes.

The ONE and the PS4 are both based on X86 and similar.  The PS4 has faster memory in it, and also is able to render faster.  They are saying like 50% faster than the ONE.  These are raw numbers, and similar difficulty to code, if not the PS4 being easier, due to Microsoft including the extra RAM inside to offset the slower DDR3.  They may be in the same class, but the PS4 can at least keep up with the ONE, if not surpass it AND is is le4ss expensive.  I would seriously suggest you NOT compare the PS4 to the PS3 here, because the PS4 is easier to code for, much easier.

I think it's more relevant to consider whether the PS4 is easier to code for than XboxOne.

One uses DirectX - essentially it's own platform that scales to thousands of possible system configurations.

One uses a proprietary language.

In some ways it would be like comparing PC development to Linux.

Guess we'll see how it turns out. But based on over a decade of solid development support for their platform - I wouldn't be too worried about MS' position.

If I were microsoft I'd keep quiet about on the issue of performance because its just away to fuel the war on the other side of the fence.

In 5 years time alot of people on both sides are gonna look pretty stupid. The games will be visually the same. There is no advantage. The games now prove it. And they will prove it in 5 years.

  Why won't MS just shut up?