Oh, it's great that they have those things. But Sony also offers their games digitally, and unlike Microosft, the change isn't forced on you. Consoles are not PCs, and there's some things people like about having physical disks they actually own. That they can do whatever they want with.

It's one of the best looking open world games out there, it's obvious enough. I happen to have a modest PC myself.

It's a stretch, considering it's not proper offline. There's no way to control it, you're always tied to a 24 hour limit. So much for standards.

Oh no, and I'm not sure what happened there. These games are still very much in development, but the infamous gameplay shows off the PS4's power well. That game could pass off as a high-end PC game.

What? Why are you dragging performance into this?

There are dev kits, which usually have a bit more RAM than retail models, and then there's "PCs with similar specifications" to the console. Battlefield 4 was running on a PC, not a dev kit.

Where did I say that you can't play games unless your box is connected?

The only thing available are dev kits, retail versions don't exist yet and they were only finalized recently. It was running on a PC.

The way you worded that makes it seem like the demo took 64 consoles to run. The player count and performance are targets they announced, the actual build showed off at E3 was not running on Xbox One hardware.

I admit, I threw in the snark to counter the snark, but that's not true. Apparently Dead Rising and Battlefield 4 were not running on Xbox One hardware.

Oh I know how it'll work, and you can do the exact same thing with SimCity. It just doesn't wait a whole day, much less, and apparently this fact has been blurred over by so many defenders.

Exactly! PC games are so cheap because no one party owns the hardware or digital stores, whereas it's the exact opposite for consoles. With consoles you end up having to put your faith into Sony and Microsoft, both of who you can't entirely trust.

Right, and I suppose SimCity can be played offline too? Who cares about restrictions, so long as you can go a minute without a cord plug in!

It makes perfect sense. There is no offline mode, or ways to play the games you want on your own time. The one day gap is nothing more than a provision for people who have spotty connections. This isn't difficult to understand.

Wait, can you buy a physical, PC copy of Portal 2 and play it after installing it when you get home? Or do you have to authenticate your games?

Yeah, no. I call that an online service that tolerates connection drops, not something that lets you play offline.

That's not entirely true, at least not nearly on the same level as last gen. This gen should be much easier to develop multiplatform games for, the gulf between the PS3 and 360 was massive.

How? There is no mandatory internet connection, which means typical product keys (as in the PC standard) won't work. Not when console's still retain a large number of offline players. Are publishers really going to sell people games they can't play?

Well, that and there's the whole indie thing. It's unfortunate that Assassin's Creed crashed, but hey, at least it was most likely playing on an actual dev kit.

I love the digital realm as much as the next guy, but none of my devices stop me from playing games offline.