E3 2013

[Jonathan Meer]

I think a little bias is showing there. Microsoft will sell better now that the online requirements/used game fees are gone. They still have exclusives that will immediately make current Xbox users jump to the One (Halo, Killer Instinct, etc).

Except no one really wants Killer Instinct. That takes your list of two exclusives (with the 'etc.' I'd be interested to see your expansion of the 'etc') down to one, which currently has a release date of 'sometime in 2014'.

The PS4 is getting Planetside 2, presumably as a free-to-play. That's a game that's caught a lot of buzz in the PC world, and will be right at home on consoles.

The price difference isn't a giant chasm like it was with 360/PS3, $100 will count but it won't count like it did last gen.

I think it'll be even more significant than last gen. Last gen, the PS3 was a more expensive machine, but it also delivered more: much better hardware, integrated WiFi, integrated Blu-Ray (which wasn't the victor at launch, but pretty quickly became the established format). This gen, the Xbox One is $100 more expensive for an _inferior product_. The systems are essentially equivalent in terms of the platform structure, but the PS4 has somewhat better components and less cruft (only 1GB of RAM devoted to the OS, rather than the 3GB reserved by the Xbox One). The performance differential is more significant than most places are letting on. Simply put, games will look better on the cheaper console.

Microsoft needs to convince potential customers that they want a Kinect, and that the Kinect is worth the $100 differential (because really, that's what we're talking about here). But I don't know anyone who really gives a shit about that thing, and if I remember right, they didn't even MENTION the Kinect in their E3 conference (other than exercising some of the functionality through voice commands).