It just keeps getting worse for Microsoft: After facing a consumer backlash over DRM, a bizarrely high price and no love on Amazon, a new scandal has emerged.

Earlier today, CinemaBlend commented on the fact that a broken Xbox One game returned to the Windows 7 home screen, and that, in a pic we could see that it was running on a Nvidia 700 series GTX GPU (the Xbox One uses AMD). The Battlefield 4 demo ‘running on Xbox One’ was also spotted to include the PC command ‘backspace’. While it sounded terrible – these are meant to be console games, CinemaBlend tried to put things into perspective:

Truth be told, none of this should be a surprise to most people given that all E3 demos run their games on high-end PCs; it’s a smoke and mirrors circus to sell the idea of the game, sort of like how pro wrestling sells the idea of fighting despite being scripted. We should all be used to it by now and it’s just common practice [from most studios] given that the devkits or comparable specs aren’t usually finalized at this point.

Turns out, however, that they are wrong. Developer of upcoming PS4/PC/iOS title The Witness Jonathan Blow tweeted (tweets ordered for clarity):

It is not true as the article says that “all E3 demos run on hi-end PCs”. The Witness was running on PS4 dev hardware, and it looked to me like all the other PS4 games were running on dev kits as well. Dev hardware is the hardware that will be in the final retail box, but in a less consumer-oriented package. Dev kits almost always have more RAM yeah. Better CPU+GPU, no… All the indies I know were running on the PS4. We worked very hard to get our game running on the actual PS4 hardware and operating system in time for the show. As did many other devs.

Sucker Punch’s Jason Connell added:

Yup, we were definitely on a dev kit. [For inFamous: Second Son]



Blow commented:

That is kind of crazy considering consoles are supposed to be on the shelves with these games in 5-6 months. During Microsoft’s press show I was impressed by how good the games looked given the console’s specs. But if they weren’t running on those specs then it becomes pretty questionable. I actually don’t want XB1 to fail because we need competition to keep things healthy.

And finally:

I’m seeing a lot of forum comments saying “it is no big deal, most E3 demos are on PCs”. False. I wonder if this is “reputation management”.

This whole thing sounds utterly bizarre: has Microsoft been essentially lying to journalists and viewers with games running on completely different hardware? Aliens: Colonial Marines drew intense criticism after it was revealed that journalists played a better version of the game than was actually released, and it’s hard not to feel deja vu.

Could Sony capitalize off of the fact that the PS4 seems far more along? Is Microsoft hiding yet another thing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.