More personally, the PS4's exclusives just appeal to me more, not to mention they have a proven track record. I have no interest in Ryse, Dead Rising 3, and Forza (hack & slash games and sim racers aren't my bag), Titanfall did interest for a bit, then it was revealed that it had no single-player campaign. I was never a huge Killer Instinct fan (I liked MK the most back in the day), either. Black Tusk is a new studio and therefore they're unproven, not to mention we still know squat about what they're working on. That leaves Halo. I still like Halo, though my interest has waned a bit after Halo 4. The promise of Halo 3 immediately sold me on a 360, but 343I's efforts on Halo 4 means the promise of Halo 5 isn't enough by itself to sell me on the XBO. Even if 343I is able to reinvigorate my interest in the series and Halo 5 ends up being the best Halo ever, I'm not paying $500 for a system that'll end up being mostly another "Halo Box."

You summed up my own thinking. I had the same experience with Halo 3, buying my 360 solely on the promise of that single game, yet my interest in the franchise also has regrettably waned since Halo 4.

Yuck. I guess I won't be able to get rid of my 360 from my entertainment center until I can build some other sort of WMC Extender. It's okay though, I wasn't really planning on getting an XOne anytime soon since it's so damn expensive.

My main computer is a Mac anyway, so I'll be using DLNA.

Does the Xbox One still have Windows Media Center too?

Sadly no, which I didn't realize until you asked. Apparently they replaced it with the fact that videos in your Videos folder and music in your Music folder will show up on your Xbox One or you can use the "Play to" feature that Windows 7 and Windows 8 has.

Let's see.

• Price isn't an issue.
• Kinect is not something I care about in the slightest.
• I don't know enough or care that much about exclusives for either console.
• Indie games don't matter either
• The functionality of PSN without a subscription, albeit limited, is somewhat appealing

Result? Pretty inconclusive. Thanks for the great job of laying this out for me, though.

As a side note, I really liked being able to stream content from my computers to my 360. Do any of the upcoming consoles do that? I thought I heard some rumblings about that kind of support getting cut back.

XBox One should be able to do all the same streaming the 360 can do (it supports DLNA) plus it can stream from SkyDrive if you really want it (cool, but really who uses SkyDrive?).

The PS4 for some reason dropped DLNA support.

As for the rest of your stuff, yeah pretty inconclusive.

If you just want a couch box, definately the PS4 then. Cheaper, smarter design, better hardware, etc. The early games look better on the xbox 1, but honestly, both systems look to have pretty abysmal launch lineups.

Console gaming is more for the "kick back with the bros and shoot some things" games. I'd say the word casual, but I don't know what kind of mess that might kick up these days.

Caszh is the new hardcore dude.

I say spend 800 dollars to build a nice little PC. It's a bit more, but you save money on games, save money on no live, you get more variety, mods, better hardware etc.

You're talkin' to a PC gamer who is into "esports" and "progaming" so I'm good on that front.

Console gaming is more for the "kick back with the bros and shoot some things" games. I'd say the word casual, but I don't know what kind of mess that might kick up these days.

• Price isn't an issue.
• Kinect is not something I care about in the slightest.
• I don't know enough or care that much about exclusives for either console.
• Indie games don't matter either
• The functionality of PSN without a subscription, albeit limited, is somewhat appealing

Result? Pretty inconclusive. Thanks for the great job of laying this out for me, though.

As a side note, I really liked being able to stream content from my computers to my 360. Do any of the upcoming consoles do that? I thought I heard some rumblings about that kind of support getting cut back.

Well, I was going to early adopt one of the two systems because I wanted to play games like Watch Dogs and especially Destiny (yeah, they're cross-gen; I still want to play the best version, though), and the week of E3 I had made my choice. I'm getting a PS4 first, for several reasons:

1) Price. At $400, The PS4 costs $100 less than the XBO. $100 that can be spent on other things, like, say, a couple of games. For someone like me who doesn't have a ton of disposable income, $100 is a lot, and it takes me months to save up/pay off a big purchase like a game console. The XBO costs $100 more because of Kinect, plain and simple, and I have no interest in the device.

2) Online Services. While PSN used to be a joke, PS+ is now considered by many to be at least as good if not better than XBL Gold. As an added bonus, should I ever decide that I'm done with online gaming period, or my subscription lapses because I don't have the money to renew it, I can still use all my PS4's functions sans online play (and even then some games won't require PS+) and the Instant Game Collection. Meanwhile, MS is still locking nearly everything behind the Gold pay wall. It's easier to list the things you don't need Gold for than the things you do need it for. Basically, you can listen to CDs, watch disc-based movies, and play single-player games, things I was able to do with my PS2 more than a decade ago.

3) Games. While both systems are on par for launch window exclusives being released to retail, in the long term Sony has the advantage. MS's refusal to invest more heavily on in-house development means that the only first-party studios they have that are working on major AAA exclusives are 343I, Turn10, Lionhead, and a new group called Black Tusk, with Remedy being a de facto second party. Meanwhile, Sony has Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Polyphony Digital, Sucker Punch, Evolution Studios, Media Molecule, SCE Santa Monica, and SCE Japan Studio, as well as second parties like Quantic Dream and Ready At Dawn. If history repeats itself, the XBO might do well in the short term as MS invests in buying exclusivity rights for various games from third-party publishers, but after the first 3 years or so, they'll eventually be whittled down to Halo, Forza, Fable, and maybe one or two other games, while the PS4 will still be getting a solid stream of exclusives, most of which will be first party.

Of course, that's just retail exclusives. The PS4 is getting a huge flood of indie and other downloadable games, including Resogun, Rime, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, The Witness, and, well, everything else in this list here.

More personally, the PS4's exclusives just appeal to me more, not to mention they have a proven track record. I have no interest in Ryse, Dead Rising 3, and Forza (hack & slash games and sim racers aren't my bag), Titanfall did interest for a bit, then it was revealed that it had no single-player campaign. I was never a huge Killer Instinct fan (I liked MK the most back in the day), either. Black Tusk is a new studio and therefore they're unproven, not to mention we still know squat about what they're working on. That leaves Halo. I still like Halo, though my interest has waned a bit after Halo 4. The promise of Halo 3 immediately sold me on a 360, but 343I's efforts on Halo 4 means the promise of Halo 5 isn't enough by itself to sell me on the XBO. Even if 343I is able to reinvigorate my interest in the series and Halo 5 ends up being the best Halo ever, I'm not paying $500 for a system that'll end up being mostly another "Halo Box."

So, it was pay $400 for a system that'll have Killzone, Infamous, Knack, DriveClub (more arcade-y than Forza), and whatever ND, MM, and the rest are working on, as well as a huge selection of indie games as well as exclusive content for Destiny, or pay $500 for a system whose first interesting exclusive isn't due until next fall. The choice was easy to make: PlayStation 4. Once the price goes down to around $350 or less, I'll get an XBO, but as of right now, the combination of games, price, and other small bits of miscellany make it an unappealing choice as of the present date. Meanwhile, Sony has hit all the right notes throughout the year.

So, as for you, HP, what matters to you? Is price important? Do you like indies? Are system specs a big deal? Do Sony's exclusives appeal to you more than MS's? Then get a PS4. If money is no object and you don't mind paying $100 more for Kinect, if you like MS's exclusives better, if you think Kinect is the most awesometacular must-have accessory ever, and if specs and indie games aren't important to you, then get an XBO.

Hi everyone. Help me out?

I'm thinking of actually playing video games again. I heard that some new consoles were coming out.

Which should I choose? XBone or PS4?

I have no idea about anything ever.

State your cases!

I was wondering why you were never on.

I'm going to give you the best answer (obviously)... Do Nothing. You will get the best results in the long run, if you can wait... it doesn't have to be long.

Its the Holiday season and everyone loves a new console smell, but its a lie. After the first influx of users, and the results of said influx are known - then would it be a good time to choose. 2014 is just around the corner.

But now? Ha. If you must . . . Flip a Coin.

This guy knows what's up.

I think I'll wait until the hurly burly is done, and the battle is lost and won.

[citation needed]

Well, I was probably being hyperbolic by suggesting that a substantial number of people with 50" screens game at 6' or less.

However...

Not sure about any terribly scientific studies, but conversations around the internet seem to suggest that 12' is quite on the high side. For instance, here's a thread I saw a year ago on GAF regarding the subject. Not a huge sample size, but if you compile all the responses that people offered regarding actual television sets, it looks like this (I took the middle of the range for people who gave a range over which they sit):

And the person at 12 feet? That was the OP, who was saying that it felt awkward to sit so far from the TV.

Other places on NeoGAF seem to give similar results. There are annual threads where people post images of their setups... a lot of the posts don't give a very complete picture of the rooms, but of those that do, far less than half the posts demonstrate what looks like a TV viewing distance of more than 12'. And of the ones that even let you sit that far back given the furniture placement, some look like the sort of setup where you'd sit on the edge of the couch (and thus actually game at ~10').

My own experiences tend to agree with the NeoGAF's visible distribution. I usually game at 6'-10' on a 37" screen depending on how I feel and what I'm playing. And of my friends whose viewing distances I can recall off the top of my head, most sit in the ballpark of 6'-8' from their HDTVs.

I suppose it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and that the various populations I've sampled from have all been skewed in the same direction, or that my sample sets are too small, etc... but I'd be extremely suprised if I was wrong about the basic claim that most console gamers play at <12'.

Xenos:

Personally I set about 12' from a 60" TV and while I can tell a difference between 720p and 1080p it's not such a big difference that I feel slighted with 720p. In fact all my blu-ray rips are ripped at 720p because the better quality isn't worth the extra HDD space in my opinion.

If we assume that distance/(screen diagonal) is a more reasonable basis than raw viewing distance (which it is to an extent), you're not an outlier. You do have an above-average TV diagonal, however. The same ratio would put me 7.4' from my TV, which is on the lower half of the distances I use.

Your blu-ray example sucks, though. The real world has a lot of photons flying about, and the result is that live-action footage has nearly perfect supersample antialiasing. Ditto for CGI; it doesn't have to render in real-time. So even if the video is encoded at 1080p, it might have been rendered at some cartoonishly high resolution like 15360x8640.

This is why I brought up the importance of supersampling in the low-resolution TV discussion. Even if higher resolutions won't make the images much sharper on a 720 TV (or when playing on a 1080p TV from a large viewing distance), it will make them more stable. When you compare a 720p encoding of a film versus a 1080p encoding of a film, your only limitation is the raw crispness/sharpness. The discrepency in raw crispness/sharpness is going to become less prominant very quickly with distance. Even 480p DVDs, relatively blurry and poor in colour quality, manage to avoid aliasing. Yet at 720p, thin geometric details and tron lines in Halo 4 alias and shimmer like crazy.

And that sort of shimmering isn't something that disappears at a low distance. One day I decided to try and see if it were possible to sit far enough from the TV that Halo 3's specular aliasing wasn't obvious. Soon enough I hit the back wall of my house, fifty-three feet away. The game was unplayably hard to make out at that distance, but I could still see those artifacty thin highlights crawling and shimmering just fine. Higher resolutions help to mitigate that sort of thing.

I would argue that conflating a given resolution in film encoding with a native game resolution is a common form of unintentional (or sometimes intentional, if you're deliberately misleading people) equivocation.