The XB1 launched at $500 with Kinect at 1.3 TF. How do you propose that $300 is reachable? That'd only be possible if MS completely screwed up the XB1's design at spent $200 on an extra 15% performance or something. Even half the performance, 0.7 TF, wouldn't have dropped the price $200.
A $299 console with Kinect would be far less powerful than PS4 - it'd have to be to accommodate $100 of Kinect, unless MS were to foot a crazy-big loss-leader. At $399 without Kinect, they could have matched PS4 exactly. At $399 with Kinect, they'd need to be under PS4's spec. At $299, they'd be well under.
There design choices may not be the best, but it's silly to suggest that they overspent by $200 and could have had a very similar machine for $299 with Kinect. the original idea wasn't going to fly as a games console. Certainly not a true next-gen games console. So MS combined a next-gen games console with Kinect, and it came with a suitable pricetag ($399 console like rivals with Kinect adding $100, plus let's not forget the whole system design to incorporate that Kinect including DSPs, VM OS, etc.).
The PC market is so stretched now, it's not really possible. A decent gaming PC is SLI'd or Titan class GPUs and an i7, components a console could never match at a mainstream price-point. The options were a me-too console on the same basic specs and designs playing the same library save a 10% difference with exclusives, or something radically different with a strong USP that could reach a far larger audience.
PS3 was still a core gaming machine with media frills. Xbox One's vision was, arguably, 40/60 to 30/07 media/gaming and Microsoft made architectural and design decisions that may limit their ability to up their gaming focus. For Sony it was easier: remove card slots, PS2 backward compatibility, and yet the console still played games and played back CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, MP3s, MP4s, anything of DNLA and so on. The sacrifices affected a few niche uses. And as devs began to work with and optimise for Cell, third parties achieved close-to parity with 360 games while exclusives like Uncharted and The Last of Us [subjectively on my part] technically blew most 360 games out of the water - as well as being great fun.
That's a pretty serious allegation. Any evidence (which can be moved into a suitable thread if so)?
That's a fair point I had overlooked. PS3's looking more like an old dog because it is an old dog! X1 might be plenty enough to tide one over to the next generation. We'll see early years at lower quality, the middle years with the hardware producing better results as it's mastered, and then the drop. But still, the lack of headroom is a mild worry. It's unlikely XB1 will be hitting 900+p @ higher framerates without PS4 offering a notable better experience. If you had to make a choice for the most 'future proof' console, PS4 will be playing COD 15 and FIFA 19 to the better quality.
But they're already apparent. On PS3, launch games were under-par versus XB360, but that's because the machine was difficult to use. Under the hood it had basically just as much juice as 360. This gen, XB1 is offering the lower quality game at 70% resolution etc. and it hasn't got more under the hood that can be tapped to gain parity. I'd even say that when things move to compute based rendering, XB1 will fall behind even more. That's not a market concern because the market doesn't think that way, but they do know XB1 is producing worse quality versions of the games right now, and they do 'know' there's no 'supercomputer hidden power' that devs will be tapping in a year or two.
