Over the past several months, Albert Penello, who leads planning for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Kinect for Microsoft, has been facing an uphill task. It was first with the comments he made in regards to the power of both the PS4 and Xbox One being irrelevant, and how the games were more important. Then events took another turn when an ex-People May Fly developer talked about how the PS4 was more powerful, leading to Penello famously stating that he had never heard of them, despite Gears of War: Judgment (exclusive to the Xbox 360).
Responding to a user on NeoGAF (on a thread regarding EDGE’s recent article about the PS4 being more powerful according to various developers) who stated that “we will get nothing from Albert again concerning numbers” and “Prepare to have none of your questions answered. That may be a good thing but embarrassing for Albert”, Penello stated that, “If you go back an look at my posts during the big numbers debate, I said as much. I fully admitted that, since people had asked, I went to the engineering team to provide more detail on the numbers.
“You will see more from us on the numbers and explaining things we’ve done with AMD. You won’t see more from *me* on this – but I said that part already – hence why I’m not jumping in to the debate again. I’d like to, believe me, but learned my lesson on that. This type of info needs to come directly from the architects.
“I will continue (and did today) answer questions about the platform where I can. But I’m tapping out on this one for now!”
Which begs the question: Will being more powerful effect either console’s chance of success when the PS4 releases on November 15th in North America and November 29th in Europe and the Xbox One launches worldwide on November 22nd.