It's interesting to hear a producer speak candidly about budget limitations as the reason for choosing a certain direction with a game franchise. I suspect that unlike previous generations, the X360 and PS3 will continue to have long lives beyond the release of their successors. Many developers will wait for the next-gen market to flesh out a bit before they start releasing new titles that may not recoup their investment while the install base is small.
I thought that Minecraft on the XBOX was gimped in comparison to the PC version. I'm surprised that it continues to sell so well. For a downloadable title, it ain't cheap.
Kudos to the mention of FreeBSD. I didn't know the PlayStation OS was FreeBSD-based.
Virtual memory might be nice to have in some instances, but I doubt game developers will rely too heavily on (slow) memory that might be swapped out or garbage collected at some nondeterministic point during gameplay.
As someone who barely has three-dozen friends across the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3, I'm not concerned about having more friends. I do fear that this will encourage more "frivolous" friend requests...I actually prefer fewer slots that might make people be more judicious before they send that request.
I also wish there were more companies that didn't treat jobs and people as capital to be downsized whenever there's trouble on the bottom line. It sickens me to see executives slash thousands of jobs in one fell swoop and then get rewarded at the end of the fiscal year with bonuses to inflate their seven-, eight-, and nine-figure salaries.
Given that the PS3 operating system is the 2006 equivalent of DOS, I can't imagine that the PS4 OS will require much RAM while games are running. Sony is terrible at writing software.
theKSMM's comments