Xian said,

I thought the press conference went well. They pretty much outgunned the Xbone in every respect – hardware, developer friendly, and price. I really liked the look of Dark Sorcerer and Elder Scrolls Online, but would probably play the latter on the PC, if at all. Watchdogs looked like it would be fun.

The one thing I was disappointed was what was unsaid – they said that single player games would be free, implying that multiplayer would require a PS+ membership. That has always been a problem with the Xbox. There are 4 gamers in my family, and each one requires a separate Live account to play online – that adds up fast.

Rampant Coyote said,

It’s kind of a weird relationship between indies and the big publishers / studios now. I guess it varies from studio to publisher. Two generations ago, we were ignored. Then you had the last gen, where – if we were acknowledged at all – it was often to mock us or to crush us (EA claiming that they’d put us out of business because the cost of producing games was now so high…) To… well, now, where they kinda like us, and want a piece of the action. That’s WEIRD, man. But I guess it suggests that we’re getting the beginnings of a healthy ecosystem.

Anon said,

@Jay:
What you say is not really true: Sony not only did no mistakes at the E3 – they punctuated Microsofts shining armor with features that people wanted to hear and then nearly decapitated Microsoft with the launch price axe. While the lower price wasn’t to be expected (and nobody predicted it!) it isn’t too surprising, either!
You see, the exact same thing happened in console history before!
When Sony launched the PS1 in the US in 1995 (yes, it’s that long ago! ;-)) they announced a price of $100 less than their closest competitor – Sega Saturn – that got introduced a week earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn
This was an incredible blow for Sega and when they has to drop the price in the following months, they made lots of first adopters unhappy. It really was the beginning of the end for Sega as a string of management and marketing mistakes happened after that (one is always smarter after the fact, of course).

Back to Microsoft:
They had an immense success with the X360 but they’ve become cocky and arrogant (see their remark about backward compatibility) which made them vulnerable.
Don’t expect Sony to not exploit this! – they have experience in dooming competing consoles. They not only buried the Saturn but killed the Dreamcast with overblown specs on the PS2: “75 million polygons” – a number that was both exaggerated for realistic situations and totally unimportant for the gamer (the Dreamcast was a great console and could fight the more modern but much more complex to program PS2). When EA announced that they will support the PS2 but not Dreamcast the latter was finished as a mainstream console.

So it’s now important how Microsoft will react in the following months. They were once aggressive to please gamers with their Xbox1 and got more professional with the X360 but now they are aggressive against gamers. Sony on the other hand is more desperate to survive and will throw in features to turn the PS4 into a success.

Take PSN+ for example: It’s a good package for the free games alone but Sony wouldn’t have done that if the PS3 was more successful from the beginning! In my opinion the moment they relaunched PSN+ they found their way back into form. Microsoft is now clearly trailing Sony and I say that as somebody who has consoles from both manufacturers at home.

However, Sony wants to make money in the mainstream business and they will only cater for indies as long as they make money from it (perhaps simply by luring more people onto the platform). They had big successes with some indie games in the past like Flower, Journey etc. but make no mistake: Sony does *not* make indie consoles. They never will – it’s just a nice, cozy corner in the “department store” they opened up for platform customers.