"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage against Xbox, but perhaps the split is even worse than that beneath the surface. "
Call me dumb if you want, but I still see a big issue in MSFT’s naming convention for XBox. They need to stop trying to be clever and just do something sequential.
They’re just following the naming convention established by Windows: 1, 2, 3, NT, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11
Only if… if Windows used same scheme as Xbox you’d get:
Microsoft Windows, Windows 95 , Windows XP, Windows One, Windows OS NT, Windows OS One.
That is a circular problem. People don’t buy Xbox because it doesn’t have exclusives appealing enough to make them pick it over the alternatives. As much as I’d wish game exclusivity wasn’t a thing, it does effectively attract customers. They had many IPs which could attract players, even before the ActiBlizz acquisition.
The Xbox Series S sounds appealing in theory but they could have gotten all the benefits of that simply by supporting the Xbox One for an extended period of time. As for cloud, I doubt it is that which is holding back their sales. If they say the demand is still small they are likely not keeping too many units for that.
Xbox because it doesn’t have exclusives appealing enough to make them pick it over the alternatives.
Soon. Their acquisition of Bethesda and now Activision will push a lot of in-demand titles to Xbox and PC going forward. They’ll be a lot more “competitive” with Sony now.
I’m skeptical, because they had Halo, Banjo & Kazooie, Conker, Perfect Dark, and they don’t seem to know what to do with those. Killer Instinct 2013 was nice but it’s been a decade we don’t get anything else from that. We are only now getting to see some of the projects from the newer studios they have been acquiring, but Redfall definitely didn’t get my hopes up.
Are they gonna keep buying publishers whenever their output dries up under them? Is the problem really a lack of studios or is it that they can’t manage them well.
The problem is that development times exploded upward, so it takes so, so long to get a game out the door, and it appears as if they’ve done nothing. The first game from the Zenimax acquisition that started development under Microsoft leadership likely won’t come out until 2026, for example. Sony already released most of their heavy hitters, and the next big Sony first-party game similar to God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, or The Last of Us is likely several years away still (Wolverine, maybe). The next one after that will probably be a PlayStation 6 game.
As for Killer Instinct, rumor has it we’ll see another one in the near future, probably from Bandai Namco now that they’re not working on Soul Calibur or Smash.
That is true, but maybe it’s all the more reason to wait and see what they can do with the whole publisher they already have before they buy another.
If I’ve got money to invest now, I’m going to invest in two things that are likely to make money rather than waiting to see if the first one makes money over a couple of years. Especially when ActiBlizz was on a fire sale.
I’m not saying Microsoft itself should have been the one to decide this.
Do you think the Bethesda acquisition by itself, before Activision, would have been enough to turn PlayStation’s 2:1 market lead into something far more even? Because I don’t. And I think that’s why the deal didn’t get blocked. There’s also tons and tons of third party competition in the gaming industry worldwide, so I don’t think they’re a threat to competition there either.
Their management kind of sucks but that isn’t rare in games publishing. Publisher make insane moves all the time. Unfortunately for MS, from your list only Halo is relevant and that has had rocky releases for quite a while. Now that they can sequester Bethesda and Activision games they can probably be hands-off and just wait for exclusive sales to come in.
That definitely doesn’t inspire confidence, especially when, for all of Sony’s sketchy deals, their first-party games are consistently good.
They could be pushing out perfect dark games, banjo kazooy, what else do they have? So many things!
As a current Switch owner deciding what to pick up next time I spring for a new system, the lack of anything portable from Microsoft and Sony is kinda wild to me.
I still rock my Vita, and it makes me unreasonably angry that Sony didn’t seem to take it seriously.
Well Sony tried twice and it didn’t really pan out either time.
That’s a good point. No company has had a great time throwing their handheld into the market across from a Nintendo product.
Steamdeck and Evercade seem to be holding their own, at least.
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@Hdcase Microsoft has a focus as publisher to publish on PC/Steam, Playstation and Switch, alongside mobile platform and TVs with pre installed streaming and access to Game Pass. The Xbox consoles is only a slice of the entire eco system Microsoft is building up.
I don’t think it’s hardware. It’s a differentiator. Tell me why I (or whoever) should pick an Xbox over a PlayStation?
Microsoft tried to answer that question with Game Pass, seemingly going all in on that concept, paying or outright buying publishers to bring their games to Game Pass. Some people may love Game Pass, but most people I know either never subscribed to it or only tested it when it was like 1,-€ for a month or whatever.
What else differentiates it from the PS5 in a positive way? Sure, the Series X is a bit more powerful than the PS5, but it’s close enough that it basically results in slightly different behavior for games with dynamic resolution scaling, with the PS5 sometimes even pulling ahead oddly enough (probably a more mature SDK, not sure).
The controller is…well, a decent controller. It doesn’t do anything special like adaptive triggers, yet it costs almost the same as a DualSense, and if you count in the optional (!) battery pack, it’s quite a bit more expensive even.
Playing online costs just as much as on PS5 (why do you have to pay extra to play online in 2023, anyways?).
Of the few mentionable exclusive games, most are honestly just mediocre (also in terms of critical acclaim).
What’s left? Backwards compatibility for 360 games? Sure that’s nice, but surely not a system seller for most people, especially when they don’t already have a ton of 360 games.
I just don’t see many cases where someone would prefer the Xbox Series X to a PlayStation 5, without even taking into account what platform their friends are on.
If you want to win market share, deliver a better product. With better services. With better conditions. For lower prices.
That is how it works. Crying to the public about how unfair it is because Sony has such a large installed base already because of how Microsoft fucked up the Xbox One generation (at or even before launch) is NOT how it works.
