Business Approach Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox

[eastmen]

You can order ps4 launch edition on Amazon.com. it just the demand is so great they have like 5 sku. At my local gamestop they are still taking ps4 preorders and they already 5:1 advantage to xbone.

Gaf is the source for a ton of leak info. The guy has been correct in the past with info but these are just estimates so take them with a grain of salt. The yield numbers he said came from a insiders source in the chip industry.

We also have the leak gamestop memo From friday that states the ps4 preorders "flood gates are open." That's less than a week after the gamestop CEO stated they would buy every ps4 Sony can make.

Flood gates were open for the xbox 360 also. It resulted in people who had preorders not getting thiers till spring of 2006.

My sister and I preordered out xbox 360s a week apart. Both 20 gig consoles . I got mine launch day , she got hers the first week of January.


So when gamestop actually gets the amount of units it will receive for launch day you will see a lot of people getting called and being told there was a delay on sony's part and they can't fill demand and perorders will be pushed back. This will likely happen a month before launch.

At that time no one else will have stock avalible and so the majority of people will just wait. All the while Gamestop is sitting on a $100 + per peroder (some people order games / controllers / headsets / or put more than the minimum per order down) and would have been collecting intrest on it for months. Its a win win for these companies.

 

[Nesh]

Can you point to the conference that outlines PS4 support for Europe please? I dont rememebr that info or focus at the reveal in February or E3.

They didnt have to

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Flood gates were open for the xbox 360 also. It resulted in people who had preorders not getting thiers till spring of 2006.

My sister and I preordered out xbox 360s a week apart. Both 20 gig consoles . I got mine launch day , she got hers the first week of January.


So when gamestop actually gets the amount of units it will receive for launch day you will see a lot of people getting called and being told there was a delay on sony's part and they can't fill demand and perorders will be pushed back. This will likely happen a month before launch.

At that time no one else will have stock avalible and so the majority of people will just wait. All the while Gamestop is sitting on a $100 + per peroder (some people order games / controllers / headsets / or put more than the minimum per order down) and would have been collecting intrest on it for months. Its a win win for these companies.

X360 had all kind of problems. Yields were terrible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/13/xbox-truth

Seems ms has learn very little with the x360. We already have a lot of reports of yield issues again in the xbone.

Sony had a lot of the same problem with ps3 with bluray drive parts and cell yields. So they went with a "boring" design compare to the xbone.

 

[eastmen]

Okay , I hope oyu got in early on the ps4 reserves so your not waiting till 2014 for yours

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Okay , I hope oyu got in early on the ps4 reserves so your not waiting till 2014 for yours

Some people are bound to be disappointed. According to an Amazon UK press release reported on by IGN, Amazon UK were taking 2,500 nextgen console pre-orders per minute during E3 week. Now that's just nuts!

The game I most want is Infamous Second Son which is due until February 2014 anyway. Oh and Watchdogs, but I could buy that for PlayStation 3. Admittedly I would be sitting there, rocking back and forth on my sofa muttering "this sucks.. this sucks.. this sucks.." ;-)

 

[patsu]

[Point finger at EU] Aren't you guys in some sort of economic crisis ?

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Okay , I hope oyu got in early on the ps4 reserves so your not waiting till 2014 for yours

Yeah I preorder less than 10 minutes after it went live on Amazon and was at gamestop right when they open the first day they took preorders.

 

[blakjedi]

I dont get why they didnt have to.

i dont think anything is a given. MS has a committment to Europe in this cycle. Not sure why thats in question - Having FiFA as a major part of their reveal shows that.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

[Point finger at EU] Aren't you guys in some sort of economic crisis ?

Consumer spend is critical for economic recovery. And we're taking that very seriously over here in the UK ;-)

 

[Phil]

I dont get why they didnt have to.

i dont think anything is a given. MS has a committment to Europe in this cycle. Not sure why thats in question - Having FiFA as a major part of their reveal shows that.

I don't think you are understanding.

PS4 == game console with extra features, just like PS3
Xbox One == full package with lots of features that are unknown how they will work in the EU. Also plays games.

It's not the games that the EU is unsure of. That is a given. It's about the entire package. Microsoft were the ones who demonstrated what more their console could do; their vision of the centered livingroom experience. They even devoted pretty much the entire reveal to that. Those are pretty much the questions that are yet unanswered that us Europeans are especially interested about.

There isn't something that needs 'special' EU catering in what Sony has demonstrated with PS4 so far. No features that are exclusive to one market, but just a logical extension of everything that we already know on the PS3 so far.

 

[patsu]

Okie okie, please do buy more. Thank you very much sir on behalf of the game developers.

 

[Nesh]

I don't think you are understanding.

PS4 == game console with extra features, just like PS3
Xbox One == full package with lots of features that are unknown how they will work in the EU. Also plays games.

It's not the games that the EU is unsure of. That is a given. It's about the entire package. Microsoft were the ones who demonstrated what more their console could do; their vision of the centered livingroom experience. They even devoted pretty much the entire reveal to that. Those are pretty much the questions that are yet unanswered that us Europeans are especially interested about.

There isn't something that needs 'special' EU catering in what Sony has demonstrated with PS4 so far. No features that are exclusive to one market, but just a logical extension of everything that we already know on the PS3 so far.

He doesnt get it

 

[mrcorbo]

I don't think you are understanding.

PS4 == game console with extra features, just like PS3
Xbox One == full package with lots of features that are unknown how they will work in the EU. Also plays games.

It's not the games that the EU is unsure of. That is a given. It's about the entire package. Microsoft were the ones who demonstrated what more their console could do; their vision of the centered livingroom experience. They even devoted pretty much the entire reveal to that. Those are pretty much the questions that are yet unanswered that us Europeans are especially interested about.

There isn't something that needs 'special' EU catering in what Sony has demonstrated with PS4 so far. No features that are exclusive to one market, but just a logical extension of everything that we already know on the PS3 so far.

The fact that most US households have a STB allowed MS to use the HDMI-in & IR blaster as a shortcut to bring live TV to this market. I expect that this is just a temporary solution until MS can work things out with the various companies in charge of content delivery (cable/satellite/IP) to provide those capabilities through the XBOne itself. If, as has been represented, STBs are not a common delivery method for live TV in the EU, then that shortcut is not available and it will take more time to deliver these services.

In the long term I expect the HDMI-in will be deprecated over time as arrangements are made with the cable/satellite/etc. providers and that MS will be pursuing these negotiations worldwide. Eventually, it should be possible for there to be a fair amount of parity in the services available in the major global markets.

That having been said, it's of course perfectly reasonable to not see the appeal of services that aren't available to you.

 

[keenism]

Maybe this will help(me understand your opinions a bit better), possibly not. Nesh...Phil, where are you located?

 

[Arwin]

In times of crisis, you spend money on a game console but save on your (second) holiday.

 

[liolio]

Yeah. PC is zero threat to console gaming. If it were, it would have happened a long time ago.

Mobile is more of a threat to console gaming, but I still feel that people want deeper experiences to go along with their casual mobile gaming.

Though I can't fanthom why people at MSFT instead of leveraging the PC in an era where desktop and laptop sales have slown down is instead crippling it with STUPID exclusive policies.

Corporations can act so dumb sometime... it is not even funny...

 

[Phil]

That having been said, it's of course perfectly reasonable to not see the appeal of services that aren't available to you.

I think that is kind of the point. I think the main criticism is that what Microsoft showed so far is very interesting, if you live in the US. In Europe - there are many issues. For one; Voice recognision is more difficult, because unlike the US, Europe is split in many different countries with different languages. How well would it work in any language other than English? Then there is the problem of German i.e. In Germany (just as an example) you have different states with slightly different variations of dialect. How well will these work?

Then you have the whole livingroom experience with switching channels, live TV etc. Good luck with how this will work out - especially considering that many countries have their own TV provider, cablebox and/or satelite. In my own country, you may have TV through a cablebox or internet based (directly from the ISP provider). Some us satelite. TV program switching in this case will not be as smooth and flawless and demonstrated at the Xbox One reveal. Even so, it would be nice if we Europeans actually got an idea how it will work in less than optimal conditions. So far, there are no indications at all - as all we've seen so far has been demonstrated from the best possible angle.

I guess in the US, for many, it's a worthwile trade-off - trade-off of hardware dedicated CUs for OS switching, live-tv integration - the whole package - because in the US, obviously, the market wants this and the way things are set-up overthere, it might actually work well. In Europe or the rest of the world where this might not work well, you are limited to the console as a game-machines with some extra features that might work, and other that simply won't (or won't be available). To them, effectively, it is an even more compromised prospect.

In my view, not answering these questions either show that there is no plan yet or that they have simply not bothered to a large degree. This might not include the UK btw. The UK is a big market within the EU, so who knows - maybe the UK will actually have quite big support where this is concerned. But we're still waiting to see, really.

 

[joker454]

As I mentioned, I have a PC I use at work, so I'm well versed in the experience that comes with - at the most basic level - maintaining a simple Windows OS.

Not to sound like a broken record, but a work pc or regular pc has nothing to do with it. A gaming pc is just that, a pc with Windows, Steam, and games, nothing more. That's how you get stability. If you introduce a million variables like work pc's do, or overclock, tinker with game config files, etc, then sure you are asking for issues. But a gaming pc remains clean. That's all I have, a pc in the closest that does nothing more than play games. I wake it from sleep, play, put it back to sleep. Not one issue with it in years, none, zero, nada. I didn't even have one game crash in all of 2012 which is more than I can say for consoles, both of which crash sometimes. In any case I have no stake here to fight this nor is it ever possible to fight stereotypes, I'll just let people believe what they want.

I still wouldn't for the love of god ever put such a big noisy PC in my livingroom - not when gaming on a console is close enough and doesn't have this inherent flaw.

Ah so that's why you never owned a PS2 because holy cow that thing was noisy. Then again you missed tons of amazing games on the PS2 just because of noise, I don't know if that noise restriction you have is worth it really but that's up to you.

Perhaps what it boils down to is that PlayStation users are far more vested in their platform than Xbox users are, Xbox users having a much stronger link to gaming on the PC.

I don't understand why people see this as the case. Many of us pc gamers became Playstation gamers first for the simple reason that it was available years before Xbox ever hit the scene. It wasn't Xbox that killed off pc gaming for many folk, it was the ps1 and ps2.

As many Xbox owners themselves have said, their prime reason for switching to consoles (namely the Xbox) was because that console offered the experience most similar to the PC - with similar games, just in the livingroom.

That's probably because of Xbox Live. Online connectivity, chatting with people, etc on pc is a given and xblive improved on that, whereas Playstation is far behind in that regard.

I guess us PS folks have valued the "experience" factor and the exclusive games far longer to ever consider moving back the PC. I would agree that the Xbox and PC have more in common than the latter does with the PS. Maybe that's why you find it so hard to understand.

If all you care about are Sony exclusives then there's nothing to say really, no amount of drm changes, gpu power, etc would have swayed you away from a ps4. There's nothing to discuss, you had made up your mind long ago, specs, etc don't matter at all in that case.

 

[ERP]

Errrr voice recognition will work in any language that the dataset have been authored for, I would assume that's any territory they launch in.
regional dialects are an issue, though I'm told MS's solution is very good and that much of the issue can be alleviated with a large enough dataset, which is why the better solutions today use the cloud for support.

What you describe with cable box's etc is no different than the US, there are probably >10 different channel lineups in and around just Seattle, but the guide is actually a relatively easy problem because 3rd party companies curate and sell the information. The issue in europe is going to be those people using a TV's built in tuner.

I don't think they ever traded off any hardware specifically fo the OS switching/live TV etc , except possibly the memory. The CU decision is completely orthogonal to the parts you state. I guess you could argue that Kinect in the box impacted BOM but that's accounted for in the price difference.

Oh having worked for MS I would be stunned if there isn't a very distinct vision and plan, I do think they have issues in Europe, but mostly because they try to reduce differences between regions. I heard someone whose worked for both companies in the gaming groups recently state that he thought that part of the reason for Sonys success was the regional fragmentation of their marketing and publishing (which is often internally lamented), because you can't treat Europe as a single territory.

 

[wco81]

However, once the new consoles come out the hardware advantage will go away for a while again (yes you can build PCs that are faster, no there won't be enough of them for a while for that to matter much), and then we'll see a real test of how much stronger the PC market has become. I think it is in better shape than it was at the previous transition, but how much better will be interesting to see.



I agree with this. People that play games on mobile now didn't buy HD consoles 3 years ago either. Wii is more directly impacted, I think.

However of course money spent is money spent. Some money that goes to tablets won't go to consoles, just as some money spent on tablets won't go to laptops, and some money spent on laptops won't go to desktops, etc. Time spent is the same.

I think a lot of the people who bought HD consoles have at least smart phones capable of gaming and a lot have tablets in addition.

I also think a lot of them are regularly gaming on mobile devices, particularly when a lot of niche PC titles were ported over.

How many of them will settle for mobile gaming vs. migrating to new consoles though?

Maybe PS4 and X1 will set records for launch volumes. But can they even match the sales of the current gen?

You would think so as gaming is more mainstream. But remember that games sales have been down the last 1-2 years and ASPs seem to be lower.

As you note, money spent on mobile devices may prevent or delay some households from buying new consoles and games.