It may seem attractive at first to differentiate from your competitor in terms of hardware architecture but in reality it is both a blessing and a curse. What exactly constitutes a "better system" is entirely dependent on what the lead platform is for developers. If your platform ends up being the lead then the choice in differentiating will bear fruit but if your rival has the lead platform then your customers will suffer a worse experience for it or developers might even neglect to release software on your system altogether ...
PS3 didn't fare much better. And MS lost a lot of money replacing XB360s, so I don't think a large portion, no larger than Sony's went to replacements.
Well it's kinda inevitable when you raise that XB360 didn't sell 80 million but don't add, by the same logic, neither did PS3.
But also your argument ignores MS's free replacements. The money MS lost isn't moot because if people were buying replacement consoles, MS wouldn't have lost so much handing out free replacements! It's there as evidence that the sales numbers are pretty reasonable and so I disagree that "a decent chunk of that 80 million sold were owners buying replacement consoles".PS3 wasn't even in my the conversation so again, has no relevance to my comment.
I never said they didn't offer free replacements, but they didn't replace every single Xbox and not everyone knew about the replacement program.
Yes it is because it doesn't affect how many were sold, they 'sold' 80 million.
The difference is that now, with more of most people's library being digital, changing machines means more. If you are a mostly physical media gamer, and have a Playstation and have been paying for PS+ for a couple of years, you would have received 2-3 free games a month. 100 games is a low estimate here. As soon as you stop paying for PS+, those games are locked and you can't play them. Without some strong motivation, most people wouldn't just abandon that library to play games on Xbox. The reverse is true on Xbox with Gamepass. If you like the library that's on there, and you switch to Playstation, you no longer have access to that library. This is all in addition to any of the digital games you already own. Backwards compatibility is the expected norm going forward. Meaning that getting people to change consoles is going to get harder and harder.
What exactly was the relevance of the comment in the first place then? Why do you want to take MS's sales in isolation and say an indeterminate but sizeable amount don't count as users, yet not want to compare MS to Sony to determine how well they were competing with their rival?
To point out that 360 sales could range from slightly skewed to really skewed so quoting pure sales numbers for 360 is never going to be possible.
Why do you want to take MS's sales in isolation and say an indeterminate but sizeable amount don't count as users, yet not want to compare MS to Sony to determine how well they were competing with their rival?
I don't have numbers, but failure rates on CECHA01 models are notoriously high. For context, I work at a retro video game store that does repairs. We won't sell a backwards compatible PS3 without testing it for 4 or more hours of continuous play. Launch era PS3's shouldn't be rare because they sold really well at launch, but working ones are. If I was guessing, about half of the ones I see now either don't turn on or yellow light, and about half of the ones that do turn on don't read games. Do a quick search on Ebay and see how many CECHA01 PS3's are available as "untested" or for parts. Protip - I bet the untested ones were tested.
You didn't provide any number either!
I've never seen a source saying 50% of 360s died either.
I respect your knowledge and attitude, and you agree that really good quality games are needed for MS success. However, all of this has the Starfield gap in Forza as well. Starfield also received a lot of 9.5-10 point ratings, and FM offers a very good gaming experience, even if it came out buggy. But these are only two games and they wouldn't have sold more Xboxes this year even if they were evaluated at 10 points everywhere. Starfield came out in September, along with Forza, a relatively classy car game. In the most important months of October, November or even December, there were no real AAA system seller titles, and this is decisive from the point of view of sales. If a Gears 6, Fable had come at the end of this year, then we could talk about a good game release. 2024 will probably be decisive in this field.
It's that, or they expand the market beyond the current demographics, like Wii did. Part of the problem with this strategy is that when Xbox tried to do this, it was with Kinect and TVTVTV with the launch of Xbox One. Now, they've shifted to streaming and mobile (with King) to try to bring games to non-gamers or casual gamers.
I agree more or less, with two caveats: Starfield and Forza reviewed in the mid-8s and the reason for that is that they weren't universally acclaimed. When a game reviews in the 9s (like Spider Man 2 and Baldur's Gate 3) it generally means there is no controversy and that the game was loved by almost all reviewers and it makes a difference to brand perception. "I can count on Sony to deliver!", exclaims the PS fan. Secondly, it's shameful that a cross-gen title like GT7 was able to outshine Forza in certain areas (not across the board). It's obvious that there was turmoil at Turn 10 for this game to turn out like it did after 6 years. A game that is current-gen only in development for 6 years should have been a 9+/10 game. This shit can't happen anymore if MS is going to actually elevate the Xbox brand. They have to bury us with 9/10 AAA releases. They've certainly spent the money to do just that. Now they have to deliver. No amount of new hardware can change MS fortunes if this doesn't happen.
Brad Sams is wrong because generations matter from a software engineering/development perspective, I think Brad Sams and Jez are just given talking points by insiders(remember they used to say a midgen refresh wouldnt happen, there would be no slimmer consoles, SSD prices wouldnt go down, and other such non technical view points). Having a fixed set of hardware(especially memory) that you know you can design your game around is one of the major advantages of generations. Consoles excel with this and despite not having the most powerful or expensive individual components, the sum of parts and software development kits provide a stable platform for game development. Cross compatibility of games has improved in part because of the move to X86 CPUs so more console titles appear on PC as well as the reverse BUT games dont automatically scale as Brad Sams thinks. It takes effort to make games run on multiple configurations of hardware.
