Microsoft team blames PS4 for no UHD Bluray

A little bit of clarity can go a long way. A few weeks ago at the reveal of the PS4 Pro, in a staff roundtable I questioned whether Sony's new console would hurt Microsoft's chances with the more powerful Scorpio. I also gave Sony an edge because of its HDR rollout to all PS4s. As it turns out, the HDR update is practically useless (no games supported yet and no video streaming) and the PS4 Pro itself will see most games upscaled, according to Sony Interactive boss Andrew House.

While PS4 architect Mark Cerny did make it clear during the conference that the Pro does not render games in true 4K resolution, many fans had no doubt assumed it would and likely glossed over his technical explanation of the Pro's "streamlined rendering techniques" and "temporal and spatial anti-aliasing." It's hard to say how much consumers will care when the Pro goes on sale in November, but Microsoft wasted no time in puffing up its chest to declare its superiority with a console that won't ship for many, many months.

Microsoft Studios Publishing general manager Shannon Loftis told USA Today, "Any games we're making that we're launching in the Scorpio time frame, we're making sure they can natively render at 4K." Moreover, Albert Penello, senior director of product management and planning at Xbox, hammered home the point with our sister site Eurogamer, commenting, "I think there are a lot of caveats they're giving customers right now around 4K. They're talking about checkerboard rendering and up-scaling and things like that. There are just a lot of asterisks in their marketing around 4K, which is interesting because when we thought about what spec we wanted for Scorpio, we were very clear we wanted developers to take their Xbox One engines and render them in native, true 4K. That was why we picked the number, that's why we have the memory bandwidth we have, that's why we have the teraflops we have, because it's what we heard from game developers was required to achieve native 4K."

That's a punch to the gut in true console war fashion, and one that Microsoft is no doubt happy to get in during a console cycle which has seen PS4 dominate. It may not seem like a big deal right now, as 4K TV sales are still relatively minor, but the prices are falling and interest in 4K and HDR is picking up, not only with consumers, but also with game developers and content providers for streaming services like Netflix. This could be a decent holiday for the 4K TV market, and by the time Scorpio actually does launch there will be that many more 4K TV owners to target with the only console that renders 4K natively. That's a nice feather in Microsoft's cap.

This week we also featured an interesting writeup on VR and AR from DICE Europe. While VR proponents like Unity's Clive Downie said there will be over a billion people using VR in the next 10 years, others such as Niantic's John Hanke and Apple boss Tim Cook cast doubt on the long-term appeal and commerical success of VR. Of course, this isn't the first time that people have wondered whether VR will ever move beyond a niche category - and indeed, our Rob Fahey talks about the over-investment in the space in his column today - but the idea that VR is merely an intermediary step before AR comes into its own is the wrong way to think about these technologies in my view.

Just because they both offer altered realities and utilize headsets does not mean they should be lumped together. The use cases and experiences are vastly different for VR and AR, and while I agree that AR likely is the better bet from a commercial standpoint, I don't underestimate VR for one second. I've had way too many fun game sessions using the tech already, and it's early days. Beyond that, serious movie makers are starting to leverage the great potential of the medium. Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Jungle Book), for example, is working on a VR film called Gnomes and Goblins and he's even brought on veteran game designer Doug Curch (System Shock, Thief) to fine tune the VR interactions.

The fact is VR has enormous storytelling potential and can immerse its users in ways that we've never experienced before. "As I work in film, so much has been done," Favreau commented. "There are technological breakthroughs but there is less and less up in the air.  You're really writing a song in the same format that has been going on for at least a hundred years. And what's interesting about VR is that, although I really don't know where it's going or if it's going to catch on in a significant way culturally, I do know that there is a lot of unexplored territory and a lot of fun things as a storyteller for me to experiment with. It's exciting to have so much fresh snow that nobody has walked through yet. There's been no medium that I've felt that way since I've come into the business, where it feels like you can really be a pioneer."

AR will be tremendously exciting in its own right, and I can't wait for Magic Leap, HoloLens and castAR, but to think that VR will be cast aside to make way for AR's ascendancy is totally off base.