As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best. With consoles, on the technical front, I want constant fluid framerates and predictability. For instance, I fail to see how PS4 Witcher 3 could be better than Witcher 3 on XBox one by any standard I care about when gaming (and I'm a professional graphics programmer).

That said, yes, it seems Sony is winning this generation in consoles. But I would claim it's due to other factors than PS4 as a piece of hardware and OS.

No PS4 is winning because of their exclusives. When you have Uncharted 4 for example as GOTY it makes it very hard for people not to choose your console.

The reason the hardware is important is because games like Uncharted, Last of Us etc (which are system sellers) stand apart from the likes of Witcher 3 because of the ability to use the superior hardware to product superior graphics. I would argue this is just as important as the game play. But again not for all games just these specific type of games.

Yes, we agree that PS4 as a platform is more succesfull than the xbox. I disagree it has much to do with hardware specs.

Yes, PS4 has a slightly better GPU but even if PS4 and Xbox one shipped with hardware where xbox one was slightly better it would not affect the current market share that much.

Up to a point superior graphics are created by superior artists and animators. Using engine and art assets by superior programmers.

Uncharted is so good because of Naughty Dog, not because their platform happens to be PS4.

Sony has played their part well, whereas Micrsoft fumbled the Xbox one launch and positioning.

The Witcher 3 is much more open world than Uncharted 4. I don't think this is a matter of optimising for the specific hardware, it is mainly the trade-offs inherent in a large open world game vs a linear game with small well defined levels. They each optimise for different values.

The PS4 has more powerful hardware than the XBox One. If they are running the same game (The Witcher 3), logic tells us that it will be easier to get fluid framerates with the more powerful console. And that is what you care about, no?

Now I don't know about The Witcher per-se but there have been a good number of multi-platform releases where performance and fluidity were compromised on XBox One.

And it doesn't just seem to be Sony, the numbers say it's Sony (especially in Europe). General consensus is that Microsoft severely botched the launch of the One and has been left to play catch-up since.

Witcher 3 on PS4 has slightly better graphics and insane texture pop in and some frame drops. I'd take "inferior" xOne version any time of the day.

The Xbox One version actually has a worse framerate and resolution and is otherwise identical in terms of textures and whatnot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHtnktoPLAo

As I said; I don't know specifically about The Witcher. I used the name as an example. There will always be additional factors beside hardware power, but in general; more powerful hardware is easier to get good results with.

If hardware was the only factor then consoles wouldn't exist because everyone would play on their PC.

> As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best.

It's never been the case.

The GC was the most powerful console of its generation, the PS2 was by far the least powerful one (with the possible exception of the Dreamcast, not quite sure where that one was).

Gamecube was quite memory-limited both in main and video RAM compared to XBox and PS2. My team was not the only one that had to play tricks to fit on that thing, swapping in and out parts of main memory (to/from the overly spacious audio memory area IIRC).

> Gamecube was quite memory-limited both in main and video RAM

I'm not saying it was a supreme machine without limitation, I'm saying it was the most powerful one. It had by a fairly large margin the most powerful CPU and GPU subsystems.

That doesn't mean there were no tradeoffs, it was all strength and it was necessarily trivial to make use of that power. Think PS3.

IIRC the Xbox was the most powerful console of that generation.

XBox was comfortably more powerful than the GC, GC was ahead but more similar to PS2 in practice, both were well ahead of the Dreamcast (Dreamcast launched first, PS2 next, XBox and GC last, so kinda to be expected). GC was hamstrung by memory issues (PS2 had better bandwidth, fill rate, media capacity, iirc), so was a bugger to use its power, but that's by the by.

So, I disagree with the first claim in your second paragraph, but my pedantry only supports your main point: PS2 won, selling 3 times the others put together. But PS2 was a long way from being the most powerful.

But, both as a developer and player, and purely subjectively, I do think XBox was the 'best' of that generation.

> The GC was the most powerful console of its generation,

That's not true. The Xbox was far more powerful CPU/GPU-wise, and had far more storage (the 8 GB HD was pretty amazing) so games could install themselves to HD and use virtual memory to increase their performance.

I don't really get the obsession with high end graphics.

Hyper Light Drifter is one of the most beautiful games I played to.

For me the Switch looks powerful enough to run beautiful games. A good art direction trumps raw power in almost all cases.

I mostly agree, but I'm worried about what it means for third-party support.

If the Switch is significantly underpowered compared to the competition, it means that developers won't be able to easily port XBone/PS4 games to the Switch which will hurt the Switch's lineup. In that case, Nintendo's best hope for success is that their Blue Ocean Strategy will take off and people will treat the Switch as not just another console but as a supremely versatile handheld.

The reason the Wii got away with it was a) Blue Ocean Strategy gave it genuinely unique games and b) the PS2 was still kicking around so the Wii version can easily be ported to PS2 and sell on twice the number of consoles (i.e. they'd make a 360/PS3 version and a Wii/PS2 version).

The Wii U had beautiful games with beautiful art direction (Yoshi's Woolly World, anyone?), but it still flopped largely because third parties ignored it and Nintendo didn't have a good enough Blue Ocean Strategy.

Right, but imagine good art direction AND raw power.

With that combination, you need something like the art direction of a Studio Ghibli in order to successfully manage the complexity (excited for the new Ni no Kuni, BTW). Most, maybe all, game studios in the west are not up to the challenge. Many indie games are much more artistically successful precisely because they have to think around the constraints and can work with a more concentrated vision.

The MGS games (MGS V and Ground Zeroes) were not exclusive to Sony in any way -- both released on the PC and Xbox.