mister crayon wrote:

... cancel dl only future, become the home plat for cod, become the home plat for budgie shooter, bring back last graun, bring back ff7, bring back shenmue, copy oculus.

You forget that Sony have been much more equitable towards indie devs from the off. 
Microsoft have *had* to respond by ditching their requirement of having a publisher (with boxed games on shelves) and relaxing their exclusivity demands, but they've still got contractual demands in there (parity clause) whereas AFAIK Sony have none.

IMHO, this is already starting to visibly pay off for Sony in that there are more indie games being announced for and released on it, which starts to pay off in about a year's time once there's a big enough back catalogue of cracking indie games such as Rocket League, Resogun etc.

mister crayon wrote:

The problem is its a snake eating its tail situation and will eventually lead to a death spiral of creative awfulness.

Well, the indies and homebrew is where you get the shorter, more innovative little games, so I think it's in platform holders' interests to make it as easy as possible for dev to get their stuff on there (and make money from it). In that respect, MS's "every xbone can be a dev kit" will be very interesting, if/when it arrives.

I'm not and your out of luck on the Ayrton.

Bob wrote:

I'm not and your out of luck on the Ayrton.

What's Windows 10 actually going to do on Xbox that's different to what it does now?

mistercrayon wrote:

The indie game courting at the start was super impressive, that's a fair point. I think the balance is about equal now as to exclusives. It feels like they each have (say) a 20mil indie exclusive budget and can nab a few.

The impression I'd got is that MS have money and can pay for exclusives, but Sony just doesn't really have spare cash floating around right now, and Playstation is to some extent propping up the rest of the company. At this point, after the initial swathe of launch "exclusive games coming" announcements, I'm getting the impression that neither company are paying indies for exclusives - they're both simply relying on the growing install bases and opportunity for sales to attract indie games. Seems like any exclusivity moneyhat funds are being put towards big-draw titles like Tomb Raider, or more often than not "launching first on...," exclusive DLC and other small nudges, rather than outright "this game is only on this machine" (simply because the machine architecture is so similar that I don't think any devs and publishers want to restrict their sales without hefty outlay).

Of course, I don't actually know any of this for a fact, just my gut feelings so I could be 100% wrong about all of it

mistercrayon wrote:

So over the next year ms get cuphead and tacoma and Sony have firewatch and the witness. The indie elephant in the room is that pc has them all. Windows 10 could impact the devkit thing I wonder.

Aye - PC still king if you want broad selection and most access to indies, greenlight, early access etc - in that respect, MS allowing early access is a pretty bold move and one I hope that pays off for them, but I'm not sure how much patience the general console gamer population has for flaky alphas/betas - IMHO, I ditched PC gaming for console just because it's less faff, and I don't kickstart or early access either as I like to wait to play games once their finished (so these days I don't even buy games day one anymore! I wait for a week or 2 for forum reports/word of mouth and for the first few patches to fix the most egregious bugs).

I've not heard anything with regards Win10 and devkit status - impression I'm getting is that MS are pushing more the other way;  win10 and Live in windows, Cortana as the voice assistant etc is the effort to leverage the xbox brand to boost their windows and hardware sales, tying xbox into the rest of their ecosystem - rather than using the rest of their software/hardware ecosystem to boost the xbox brand.

It unlocks teh infinite power of Teh Clod!

monkey wrote:

What's Windows 10 actually going to do on Xbox that's different to what it does now?

Whole new UI innit. Switching out to other apps will be much faster, as will loading friends lists, parties and achievements and stuff.

This will all be done seamlessly and with no interruption or pausing to your game. Plus Cortana will talk to you and ting.

Game DVR will also be a breeze as you can now do all that on your PC. No more clunky Upload Studio on the actual console.

Hasn't the Xbox got that Metro interface bollocks already?
Faster? Hmm. Let's wait and see. Every time MS 'improved' the 360 UI it added to the bloat and impacted the responsiveness.

monkey wrote:

Hasn't the Xbox got that Metro interface bollocks already?
Faster? Hmm. Let's wait and see. Every time MS 'improved' the 360 UI it added to the bloat and impacted the responsiveness.

But it did bring along 1 v 100 and that was great.

And not a lot that will sway the FIFA/CoD crowd from picking up PS4s by the sounds of it.

Bob wrote:

And not a lot that will sway the FIFA/CoD crowd from picking up PS4s by the sounds of it.

Yes, and I wonder how much can really be done to catch Sony at this point. I'm skeptical that a UI change will sway the man on the street as it were. It's not as though Sony are just ahead, they've sold millions more units and isn't the gap between the consoles just increasing?

In terms of interaction in game maybe.. but you need the largest installed user base to attract third party development surely?

As for Xbox/PC compatibility, why would people pay extra to have the xbox version if they can buy a cheaper PC copy? or vice versa?

Yes I thought so, but you raise an interesting point. When is a good tipping point for leaving the casual market behind? How many weekend warriors can we lose?

There is one plus to having a Bone with all this in mind - more PS4 users=less arseholes to deal with online.

FranticPea wrote:

Bob wrote:

Yes I thought so, but you raise an interesting point. When is a good tipping point for leaving the casual market behind? How many weekend warriors can we lose?

Gaaah stop using me Bob.

You love it.