During the last generation of gaming, eSports took off in a huge way. At the end of the previous generation Halo 2 was setting the scene for the next generation with the MLG hosting tournaments with around $250,000 prize funds. This lead the way for Halo 3 to take a hold of the scene and keep the Xbox as the console for competitive FPS games. Due to this companies started to support fighting games primarily the Xbox as well as sports titles such as FIFA and Madden, simply due to costs. They had to have an Xbox for Halo, so it seemed daft to purchase a new console for a cross platform game. By the end of the generation though Call of Duty had taken over as the main title and was a cross platform game.
The fall of Reach
Halo Reach was the last title to be fully supported by the MLG, but it was very quickly dropped due to lack of support by the developers and most importantly by just being a poor game. The game featured a lot of features that were not wanted by the community such as bloom, and also featured a poor choice of maps. Bungie had tried to incorporate the maps into the single player as well as the multiplayer, and from the default maps release only two were competitively viable, and one of the maps had to have quite a large amount of the map removed for it to be viable. Thankfully the game had Forge which allowed players to develop new maps (Or as would be expected - remake old maps,) but once again this wasn't idle as the color pallet was non existent and the maps were largely just grey with a small amount of color here and there.
By the time 343 got hold of the game the community was long gone and even though the game wasn't bad with the No Bloom No Sprint (NBNS) settings, it was too late. Tournament attendance was down in the US which is where Halo flourished, and it wasn't exactly strong in Europe either. 343 promised a lot of changes for Halo 4 which got the community interested again, but failed to deliver on the majority of these promises and Halo 4 was once again forgotten within weeks of release. Microsoft did run a $250,000 tournament but it wasn't enough to save the game which still pulls in very few players daily online. Both the US and EU have no decided to run Halo 3 for their competitive Halo fix, but with the latest tournament in the US getting cancelled due to only having 6 teams it doesn't look good for the future of competitive Halo. This may also be worsened if the Playstation 4 does actually become the console of choice for the next generation, and it would also require knocking a certain Activision title out of the picture.
Call of Duty rises
Call of Duty was a competitive title for quite some time on the PC, all the way from the original through the CoD4 Pro-mod (Which is still played to this day as the CoD of choice on the PC). Ever since CoD 4 though, Activision have made sure that the focus of CoD is firmly on the consoles and has been the best selling FPS for the past 5 years or so. While they usually offer early access to Xbox players, this is purely down to financial reasons than anything, and if the Playstation 4 started selling more copies of CoD than the Xbox you can be sure that Activision would happily change this decision.
In the past couple of years CoD has become the console game of choice for competition on consoles and is seeing numbers that rival what Halo ever managed to achieve even at its height. While the title has had some mixed reviews in the past couple of years, there isn't anything coming out any time soon that could really challenge its role in the competitive scene on consoles.
But what of Killzone?
Killzone is certainly a good shooter, and having played the PS4 version myself I have to say that once again it's an entertaining game with competitive promise. The game play is solid, the maps are decent and it has the best game mode in competitive team based FPS ever. Unlike normal games where you pick a game type such as TDM, CTF, Domination or so forth, Killzone plays all of them in a single game. The game is split up into rounds of around 5 minutes where you will play a game type. Whoever has the highest points at the end will win the round and the next round will start instantly without ever stopping the action. This allows for some really fun matches and really puts teams to the test with them having to play more than one game type.
However Killzone does have some big issues when it comes to competition, namely lack of demo support and lack of spectator mode. The PS4 built in recording partly helps with the demo support, but it doesn't help a great deal as it's only a video format so a) is a large file not ideal for sending to others and b) only able to be watched from the players point of view. The lack of spectator mode is once again another big issue, as the hardware required to have access to all view points in a LAN setting is expensive, and in an online situation non-existent. Spectator mode is also another feature that Halo lacked and allowed CoD to take the advantage by including it in their games.
So why not stick with the Xbox?
As it stands the Xbox is the console used because companies were forced to buy them for Halo and it made no financial sense to pick up a PS3 for a cross platform game. Now that we are in a new generation of consoles though companies are required to buy a new console if they wish to run LAN events. They are split with a choice of a Playstation 4 or an Xbox One. With the Xbox One being $100 more expensive than the PS4 companies are looking at a few thousand dollars since they have to buy multiple. This already puts the PS4 ahead, and with the lack of Halo competitions around there isn't any need to stick with the Xbox at all. The PS4 also has more exclusives available at the minute and will most likely continue with this trend, but none of these are well known competitive titles, although that could now change if the PS4 was to take off.
So the Playstation 4 is the only choice right?
On paper yes, without a doubt. But there is one other big issue stopping the PS4 from becoming the console of choice. The player base. The competitive community already has an Xbox 360, so may be more inclined to purchase the Xbox One.
This doesn't meant that the PS4 won't stand a chance however, as a lot of players have been put off by a lot of Microsofts design decisions with the new Xbox after E3 and quite a few people in the EU Halo community have opted to purchase a PS4 instead of an Xbox One. While some people have obviously already bought an Xbox One, the fact that people are already opting for the Sony version is pushing competitive players onto the PS4. In Asian countries, especially Japan, the Playstation has always been the console of choice and with Japan having a huge influx on the fighting market could secure the PS4 as the fighting game of choice. That's the first out of 3 competitive console communities looking at the PS4 as opposed to the Xbox One. If Sony was able to make a deal with Activision to get the new CoD XP tournament to be run on the PS4 as opposed the Xbox One then the sports game communities would most likely follow. I doubt the player base of cross platform games are really going to complain over having to use the cheaper console.
Conclusion
Right now it's far too early in the generation to pick a winner here, but Sony does have a strong case. The Xbox 360 was the dominant force due to the success of Halo, but with Halo no longer recognized as an eSports title the Xbox has nothing to bring players to it. This means that the market is still wide open, and could in fact by won by an outside member not mentioned above. I'm not talking about the Wii U (Which has nothing going for it yet at all), but Valves Steambox. The Steambox is a customized version of Linux and is getting complete support for CS:GO and Dota 2, which are already huge titles in the eSports market. If they were able to get Starcraft 2 and League of Legends running on it then the current generation of consoles might not actually be any sort of driving force in this generation outside of sports and fighting games. In which case it's highly likely that the PS4 will win due to the previously mentioned Japanese influence on the fighting game market.
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