I love my PS3. I have spent countless hours on The Last of Us multiplayer offerings, I’ve played through all the Uncharted‘s and God Of War’s until my hands hurt. I even have a PS4 up for pre-order and I’m looking to purchase Killzone and Watchdogs during the launch window. But even with all that said, I still think Microsoft has a slight advantage with its launch lineup. Yet even with this slight advance, it still won’t matter within the first year.
Xbox One launch line up is marginally better than PS4’s.
I know, I know, Microsoft back pedaled on all of its DRM . They have lost some consumer trust with the whole ‘Kinect spying on you’ fiasco. That, in addition to them giving out millions of emails to the government, still doesn’t change the fact that Dead Rising 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome are slightly more interesting to me than Knack and Blacklight Retribution. Of course, this all comes down to opinion and I don’t think those games will be better, I just think they are slightly more interesting.
But after launch, that won’t matter.
Sony has confirmed they have over 180 games in development for the PS4. Over 180. We still haven’t heard about what Naughty Dog, Santa Monica or Insomniac have been up to. You can almost guarantee that a new Uncharted game is going to debut for the PS4 and it will be the benchmark to show you what true next-gen looks like .
People buying a PS4 are buying it for its future catalogue.
Sony has some pretty impressive exclusives coming and we can expect to hear a lot more about them later in this year and early next year. Because of this, PlayStation gamers aren’t backing PS4 because of its launch games; it’s because of what’s coming up. Deep Down was just shown at TGS and although the stream quality is horrible and extremely compressed, it’s good to see the actual gameplay looks at least close to what was shown at PS4’s reveal.
Microsoft will need to keep bringing the games.
Make no mistake about it, Microsoft has and is going to have to bring their “A” game. The best way they can keep up with Sony is to produce the same level of triple A content with at the same pace as Sony. This generation is going to come down to indies and exclusivity. Since the consoles are fairly similar, spec and architecture wise, people will need more of an incentive to purchase one over the other. There’s a reason why Sony has pushed so hard with Indie Dev support. So hard in fact Microsoft has started to push the “we love indies too” mantra along with Nintendo.
Will this all matter a year from now?
Maybe. Maybe not. What I can say is that a year from now, we will have two consoles still fresh to the market with more games than we have now. I guess we can look at the sales of the PS4 and XB1 as an indicator of who’s in the lead and who isn’t.
When Sony first launched the PS3 it had a ridiculous price tag of over $600, was extremely difficult to develop for and was released year after the 360. Subsequently, this time around, we have two consoles before Black Friday and heading into the holiday season. Here’s to hoping Sony and Microsoft really keep to their promise and show us what true next-gen is all about.
