Outspoken Atari founder Nolan Bushnell believes Microsoft will triumph over Sony in the upcoming console wars that will pit the Xbox 720 (Next) against the Playstation 4.
“I personally believe Microsoft is in a superior position, and the reason is Sony, whenever they change consoles, the software tools that they have are lame,” Bushnell told GameTrailers.
“A lot of times in the past they were in Japanese; not well documented and getting the software development community up to speed. The American software community just says ‘Oh boy, what a pain’. And a lot of people don’t realize how strong the software community is at making the hardware platform sing and dance.”
Bushnell also noted that the Japanese-based company “really needs to get [its] act together [to fix] its god awful” online infrastructure.
“Microsoft, because of their strong software tools, will end up with much better products sooner and easier, in my estimation,” Bushnell opined.
“And with that, I think will be an advantage. And also don’t forget, Microsoft actually has so much money to defend this. Plus, they have a good infrastructure with the [Xbox Live Arcade], with their online world.”
Ouch.
It probably should be noted that Sony recently emphasized just how much the PS4 was dev friendly.
Indeed, Mark Cerny – lead system architect of Sony’s Playstation 4 (PS4) – says the Japanese-based corporation adopted a “very developer-centric approach” to the next-gen console.
“The biggest thing was that we didn’t want the hardware to be a puzzle that programmers would be needing to solve to make quality titles,” Cerny explained.
As such, Cerny began to poll PlayStation 3 developers as early as 2008, asking them what they would like to see in a theoretical next-generation console.
As TG Daily previously reported, the PS4 is powered by an AMD CPU and GPU. According to reports, the console boasts 8 x86-64 CPU cores, while the GPU is based on the next-gen Radeon graphics engine, capable of 1.84 teraflops of performance power. Because it is an APU, both the CPU and GPU reside on the same physical die, sharing 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
The console is also packaged with a redesigned controller that features a touchpad on the front, a share button, a headphone jack, a light bar for player identification and tech to sense a player’s depth and 3D position.
