Xbox product planning boss says hardware analysis between consoles is “meaningless”

By Stephany Nunneley

Xbox product planning boss Albert Penello feels that hardware analysis is “meaningless” because it’s all about the games.

Speaking with OXM, Penello said there are very few gamers who will buy consoles for the specs alone, so there is no sense in comparing Xbox One and PS4.

“The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless,” he said. “Because this isn’t like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit.

“As a matter of fact, they actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts. Our guys’ll say, we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance. For me, I’d rather not even have the conversation, because it’s not going to matter.

“The box is going to be awesome. The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it’s a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don’t know about. They’re not [head silicon engineer] Nick Baker or [corporate vice president of IEB hardware Todd Holmdahl], and I’m not [lead PS4 architect] Mark Cerny, so why are we having this discussion?”

Penello said gamers will pick a console based on its games and not the tech running it, as that is all they care about.

“So the whole numbers game – yeah, I’ve been following it online and it’s like, we tried having that argument last time,” he said. “Do I want to talk about HDMI 1.3 or 1.4, it’s like ‘argh!’ It doesn’t matter. Did you see Call of Duty, it looks fucking awesome! It’s going to be great, you know. So we’re just saying, it’s not worth the debate.”