A bunch of very fair points. You're obviously correct, I expect Microsoft to continue having a relatively easy development environment and even equal or surpass Sony's friendliness so far. But I think the reason it's significant with Sony is because it was one of the advantages Microsoft used to have against them, that has been evaporated by all accounts. If they're equal on that footing but Sony continues to maintain its traditional advantages over Microsoft, then you have a system that begins to look more and more attractive.
Also, would like to be reminded of the some of the negative Orbis rumours, because other than the RAM (which ended up WAY better than anyone expected), most of the PS4 rumours that were positive ended up being true. I just don't think I've heard much of any positive Durango rumours period.
It's definitely a great thing for developers that they've made working with the PS4 easier. The shit I've heard about working on the PS3 from friends is ridiculous. I'm not sure if they ever fixed this in the later years, but I've been told that to even have breakpoints on the PS3 requires you to add in the PS3 equivalent of __debugbreak(), which requires you to recompile and redeploy and is a huge PITA (put a break at the wrong spot? lol recompile and try again!). It sounds like they fixed issues like that for the PS4 which is great. Though, again, we don't really know anything about what the Nextbox is like to work on. Maybe it's less of an issue now, and both systems are fantastic to develop on. I'm hoping this is true, because we, the gamers, are the winners in this scenario where developers can easily create games for all systems.
I also don't think you can really judge things as being positive/negative until you hear the entire story from MS. We do not know why the Nextbox would want to have an internet connection. Yes, I realize everyone thinks this is an outright negative, but I beg to differ. Going back to one of my examples, let's look at Spotify (I love it by the way, I'm just using it to make my point). If someone were to describe Spotify as an always-online music service, but you get the privilege of being able to play music offline for $10 a month, which you don't even own by the way so you lose once you are no longer a subscriber, how do you think people would react to Spotify? When you frame it in such a raw way, it sounds fucking terrible. However, when you frame Spotify as a music service, which can bring in tons of different music for free without you having to download it, and you can easily share all of your playlists with your friends, recommend artists on social networks, etc, and you also get to subscribe to get offline playback on your devices and better quality audio, it makes it sound a little different and pretty awesome, right? It's all about the presentation of the information. That's why I think anyone who is making decisions about whether the rumors are good/bad are very premature. We need to hear the story straight from MS.
All I'm going to say is that the Stingray information and pricing is very wrong.
You're Tom Warren? I hope to see an article on The Verge about this soon then!
Is pricing here too high, or god forbid, too low?
