Most would agree that the console war for this generation of video game systems is far from over… but it may have been over before it even really started. According to comments made by well-known industry insider Ashan Rasheed, who goes by the name “Thuway” on Twitter and video game forum NeoGAF, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is the clear winner in this generation of video game consoles. He also says that will continue to be the case for this entire console generation according to his sources, suggesting that Microsoft did not build its Xbox One with the future in mind.
“Xbox One will be behind all generation, and not buy [sic] some small trivial margin. It will be enough to show up distinctly in exclusives,” Rasheed wrote on Twitter, quoting one of his unnamed industry sources. He continued in a separate tweet, “The PS4 has more left in the tank that will start showing up going forward. It was designed with more forward thinking hardware choices.”
The tweets were picked up on Monday by DualShockers.
Rasheed also noted an instance where Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward asked Microsoft to allow the company’s title Call of Duty: Ghosts access an off-limits portion of the Xbox One’s graphics processor that would have increased performance by 8%. Microsoft reportedly refused. The anecdote is seemingly intended as an example to illustrate Microsoft’s unwillingness to help developers address some of the hardware limitations of the Xbox One console.
Early numbers show that the PlayStation 4 was indeed the clear winner in the early days of the current console war. Microsoft managed to ship 3 million Xbox One units in 2013 while Sony’s PlayStation 4 shipments totaled 4.2 million consoles last year. If Rasheed’s sources are accurate and gamers start to see huge gaps in the quality of exclusive games available for each console, the sales gap we saw in 2013 may indeed grow even wider moving forward.
