Kotaku’s Jason Schreier thinks that the developers’ scale has shifted towards Sony’s direction concerning the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X question.
„Everybody is now seeing this spec sheet and they see PS5 10.2 TFLOPs and Xbox Series X 12 TFLOPs, but meanwhile, the people that I’ve been talking to over the past few months, over the past couple of years, who are working on the PlayStation 5, have pretty much unanimously all said ‘This thing is a beast, it is one of those the coolest pieces of hardware that we’ve ever seen or used before, There are so many things here that are revolutionary’.
The consensus is that these things are both extremely powerful and both very similar in a lot of ways, both do different things in really cool ways. These are both extremely impressive pieces of technology. But because of the way Sony has presented and marketed this thing, now the narrative is that the Xbox Series X is way more powerful than the PS5. And I think that is such a maybe fatal flaw on Sony’s part for this console generation. Maybe it’ll be forgotten if the PS5 comes in cheaper or has a killer launch line app, but right now, it’s just such a dropping the ball after so many years of smart decisions on Sony’s part. What I’m hearing from the people who are working on these things, working on the metal, is that the Xbox Series X is not significantly more powerful than the PS5 despite this teraflops number.
Sony has dropped the ball and there’s going to be like weeks and weeks, if not months and months, especially with Corona disrupting everything, of people just talking about how the Xbox Series X is the most powerful console and it’s beating the PS5 in every single way. Meanwhile, I’m getting texts and DMs, even today as this was going on, from developers being like ‘This is such a shame, the PS5 is so superior in all these other ways that they’re not able to message right now or can’t talk about right now’. I heard from at least three different people in the past couple of hours since the Cerny talk being like ‘The PS5 is actually like the more superior piece of hardware in a lot of different ways despite what you’re seeing in these paper spec sheets’. And so again, yes, plenty of room to talk about this, for all these companies to keep messaging and showing games. But I do think that Sony has dropped the ball so far from what we’ve seen,” Schreier said on the newest Kotaku Splitscreen podcast. However, we’d point out that he did not mention a single example, so it sounds a bit fanboy-ish for now.
This comment doesn’t apply to James Cooper (Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Codemasters, Crytek – he worked at a few places), who expressed on Twitter that the SSD could be helping with the crunch: „In theory, the PlayStation 5’s SSD means developers can worry a little less about level streaming and memory micro-management which is a huge time sink late on in the dev cycle and the source of many bugs. This means it might help to reduce the crunch!”
In theory, the #PS5’s SSD means developers can worry a little less about level streaming and memory micro-management which is a huge time sink late on in the dev cycle and the source of many bugs. This means it might actually help to reduce crunch! ?
— James Cooper (@_James_Cooper) March 19, 2020
The PlayStation 5 is planned to launch this Holiday season. The pricing is a question mark for now.
Leave a Reply