December 19th, 2013 2:03pm
I recently purchased an Xbox One because I had an Xbox 360 with an Xbox Live account. It made more sense for me to "double down" on Microsoft and buy their next-gen console than jump ship to Sony and their PS4 at this time.
Both the PS4 and Xbox One break backwards compatibility. This is expected because the Xbox 360 and PS3 used a PowerPC and Cell microprocessor architecture respectively. The new consoles use the traditional x86_64 architecture found in your regular PC which means games that target the older architectures no longer work on the new consoles. Both companies have talked about ways to bring backwards compatibility to the table later but something concrete has yet to surface.
The PS4 has the advantage in hardware because it's slightly more powerful than the Xbox One, but the software lacks the features the Xbox One has. The Xbox One is definitely geared more towards the all-in-one entertainments suite, including hardcore video games. The Kinect is a big selling point for me as it comes with the Xbox One whereas with the PS4 you have to buy their motion controller, but it's sub-par in comparison to the Kinect. In my experience controlling the Xbox One with the Kinect, it's very smooth and it's come a long way since the Xbox 360's Kinect sensor. The voice command control is also quite nice.
I would personally recommend the Xbox One because of all the features it packs in and the quality of games it will play. But that's just my opinion.
Edit: Also, both consoles play Blu-ray discs now. It's quite nice actually.