Playstation 4 winning the Free-to-Play console war - Gamescom 2013

For all our readers who've been following the console war closely, the news of the PlayStation 4's dominance in the Free-to-Play console space may come as no surprise. The console's dominance was made even more clear once we arrived at this year's Gamescom convention in Cologne, Germany.

It was with great pleasure that I found Warframe, War Thunder, and Blacklight Retribution, all playable on the PlayStation 4, at Sony´s booth. There I had the opportunity to try them all while also having a nice chat with some of the developers for both Blacklight Retribution and War Thunder.

All the games looked and felt just as good as their PC counterparts. Both Warframe and War Thunder will support cross-platform play between PS4 and PC, including synchronized updates. On the other hand, Blacklight Retribution will not be cross platform, and will update independently.

For now all the Free-to-Play titles that have been announced on the Playstation 4 have yet to be confirmed for the Xbox One. In fact, one of the Blacklight Retribution developers even told me they have no plans for the Xbox One at this time.

Sony has done a great job securing a healthy and competitive lineup of Free-to-Play games for the Playstation 4's launch. Microsoft by contrast have only announced a couple Free-to-Play titles.

It's still unclear whether Sony struck a deal to ensure the aforementioned games were Playstation 4 exclusives, or merely set to launch for the PS4 first with Xbox versions in tow sometime in the future. This has been the case with other Buy-to-Play titles in the past, but F2P games present their own unique challenges which Sony seems to better equipped to handle at present.

By Luis Dobreira