A few years on: The futility of comparing Xbox One to PS4

Just dug up this old article, and after nearly 4 years there is nothing new to say.

There is no direct comparison between the two consoles. You can’t do it on features. You can’t do it on games. You can’t do it based on any objective criteria. You need to just pick one and play the hell out of it. Why is that so hard?

This is our very subjective comparison of the two boxes, and we have provided some links to similar charts from other sites.

So, you can argue on what basis?

  • Halo on Xbox One is a deal breaker, or you can say God of War on the PS4 does the same thing. When it comes to games, they’ll be even, eventually. There is no reason for anyone to think one console will lord it over the other on the content side. Game publishers are going to hit both as hard as they can with content. They’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing franchise content. No game publisher is going to refuse your Xbox One or PS4 money. You can argue about it as much as you like, but then who wants to be a fanboy?
  • Kinect on the Xbox One. You have both gesture recognition and voice recognition. Sony isn’t far behind with the PS4 EyeToy in terms of the voice, and arguably, better integration of video, but the Wii was/is pretty good at gesture control, too, and who cares that much. Gesture control doesn’t really drive the gaming experience.
  • Which takes us to, the Xbox One is, by all accounts, trying to be a living room experience. It’s a bunch of marketing baloney, if you ask me. Your teenagers and adolescent thirty year olds are going to want to beat up on people in games, and be For Mature Audiences Only, and your moms and your toddlers shouldn’t even be in the same house when that is happening. So, explain how do you make a console gaming system into a family thing? Oh, yeah, it connects to cable and let’s you pull up a programming guide. Well, I am pretty happy with Netflix and it’s on the PS4 with Hulu Plus and other don’t-need-no-stinkin’-TV applications.
  • Microsoft has SmartGlass which works on everything from Windows PCs to iPhones. Sony’s Remote Play sticks to the PSP and Vita for secondary display functionality. Deal breaker? Heck no. Go back to my point about the living room gaming console: it’s marketing baloney. Makes for great ads that you can run during re-runs of Matlock, but game consoles should just be about games.
  • The Xbox One controller is better than the PS4 controller. Again, that’s kind of pointless when you are up against it with your buddies because, you will all be on the same controller. You suffer the same issues. Is it enough to give an edge to one console over another? Not for someone who is playing games.

I am kind of repulsed by the notion that game consoles are living room experiences. Meaning they are family fun. For about one or two days after Christmas then, real life sets in. Game consoles are for gaming. The ads and the audience and the money is in blowing crap up, getting online and teaming up with other gamers to blow stuff up, and that’s the way it should be.

You want to have a living room experience, you can visit me at my aunt’s house on Thanksgiving at around 4 pm. You’ll be lucky to find anyone over 40 who is still awake.

Here is the pointless comparison table smackdown. Enjoy, but instead of trudging through the reviews, just pick one and go out and play, dude: