You know, that both sides of the story....uhhh why is Shifty calling out himself?
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for $69 Billion on 2023-10-13
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A more fitting question: why isn't everyone following their lead?uhhh why is Shifty calling out himself?
Are you serious? That's the worst idea I've seen here yet.
I am super serious. This place could learn a thing or two by taking opposite approaches in every discussion. There's far worse ideas that have been posted here before.
Your putting words in my mouth here. I made a statement that Xbox’s fanbase is in US and UK and that outside of of those areas the power of the brand is weak.
That’s not equivalent to 360 sells less than ps3 = Sony brand loyalty.
It just means xbox presence is very diminished outside of US and UK for whatever reason that is, it’s clear that they have distribution channel issue or something of that sort since Europe is often tier 2 for them.
I believe it gives strong reasons why we are seeing Xbox move to PC and xcloud, I don’t think they can actually distribute their consoles very well outside of North American markets. This is perhaps the weakest link for the xbox strategy here, and has been for some time.
Instead of focusing on Europe for instance, MS has been focusing their efforts on Latin America. I dunno, perhaps the console is too America centric.
What is going on
Maybe tats why years Ago, Ms want to tack Microsoft prefix on xbox brand.
He's moving on to an NFT Startup company...
'Bored Ape' NFT startup names Activision operating chief as CEO
Alegre, who has served as operating chief at the videogame publisher since April 2020, will succeed Nicole Muniz as Yuga's CEO in the first half of 2023. Muniz will stay on as a partner and strategic advisor to Yuga.
iceberg187
Regular
This strikes me as more of a career choice and not acquisition related. He's going to be a CEO, career advancement at work here.
Antitrust expert who defeated Microsoft says FTC's Activision deal strategy is 'nutty'
www.windowscentral.com
Antitrust expert who defeated Microsoft says FTC's Activision deal strategy is 'nutty'
FTC head Lina Khan is pursuing a stated strategy of bringing cases even with little evidence.
www.windowscentral.com
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Deleted member 11852
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That wasn't my intention so apologies, but there are folks who have presented the "Sony brand loyalty" argument but I've not seen objective evidence that people fundamentally prefer PlayStation. From a - questionable - anecdotal perspective, when visiting Europe I've seen way more PlayStation marketing than Xbox and I would be interested to hear from those who live outside the UK what the marketing situation is where they live.
As I said, PlayStation has sponsored the Champion's League for a long time and as somebody who lives and works in London, PlayStation ads around town (on the sides of buses, in tube stations, on TV and magazines) are something that is very common. Xbox far less so. I wonder if part of that is that Sony want to sell your games and for Xbox, they figure people will spot things trickling into Game Pass - which is also not pushed at all.
I've not been to South America for a long time and that was only Brazil. Culturally, I'd expect the US to have more in common than Western Europe than South America but who knows.
I think this is probably fairly solid. I don't believe Xbox has any real push here outside of UK. I'm not sure why truthfully. I definitely see a larger push with Latin America in their marketing materials. Fundamentally, it may just come down to Xbox treats EU as a tier 2 country for Xbox and Sony treats it... well a tier 2.5 I guess. Both of them still prioritize US first. From an actual market size perspective, the biggest market is NA, followed by UK and Japan. There is still money to be made in the regions outside of that, but the payback isn't as much here. Not having that global footprint does hurt Xbox however, and I'm a bit surprised that they haven't put much effort into expanding further into EU.
This makes sense to me.
I would have thought so too. But apparently the major challenge here for console makers are the taxes. If they can find a way to produce the consoles inside LATAM, then the price comes down considerably for their population and that's a large amount of gamers waiting to latch onto something.
I did a quick check and the price differential seems fairly large (when on discount) in Mexico between Xbox Series consoles and PS5.
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Playstation is preferred in general, marketing is more pronounced, but that doesnt mean people are blindly loyal. People will get pissed off if it is a bad product. Playstation 4 was clearly a better product than One.
PS5s are preferred simply because the PS4 install base was huge, people continue their libraries and past purchases, and Series X doesnt give much reason to convert. Why should a PS4 user convert to Series X instead of a PS5?
The brand loyalty was put to the test two generations before.
During PS3 and 360 people were buying 360's A LOT initially. Especially when Gears of War was released and then Gears of War 2. People are willing to buy another console if it offers the experience they want that the other doesnt.
Many people converted to 360, but were shifting to Playstation afterwards. Especially with RRODs (some had it more than twice), they were giving up on 360 and buying PS3's.
360 sales were dropping gradually as Sony was outcompeting them as prices went down and better games were being released on it.
I bought a 360 and after a while it started collecting dust when it was becoming nothing more than just a Gears/Halo/Forza console.
PS3 was the place I was using for entertainment because it had free online, a controller that was functional with fighting games, new exclusive released from Sony's studios, and it was a better media player.
I would say the PS is preferred, not because of some blind loyalty, but because a lot of people owned a PS4 and just seems normal to buy a PS5 when it is still such a great product.
I think some people are just pissed off because Playstation is naturally and rationally preferred and just dont want to accept it.
PS3 managed to outsell Xbox 360 in less time, with generally worse multiplatform experiences, with a generally worse online service, and with usually higher price to entry. There are factors like Xbox's RROD, of course. But it isn't like PS3's didn't have a similar YLOD situation. Also PSN was down for almost a month. Exclusives are important, obviously. But it isn't like Xbox didn't have a great library of exclusives, right up until the end with Titanfall and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Maybe it isn't brand loyalty, but there's something beyond the data points that generation that caused sales to end up like they did.
also
New Study Claims PlayStation Fans Are More Brand Loyal Than Other Gamers from 2020
Sony Fans Most Loyal from 2006
Sorry I take the weekends to disconnect from the internet as much as possible so this is a late response.
I think its important to also keep in mind that the market has changed. From ps2-ps3 and xbox to xbox 360 there was very limited BC with only sony having it and only in earlier models. It would be much easier to disrupt the market coming in a bit earlier than the market leader and with some great games as MS did with the xbox 360. however the ps4 games work on ps5 meaning the 120m or so people who owned a ps4 are more likely to move towards a ps5 even if the competitor has better games or better hardware. Its very hard to convince someone to leave a platform where they have a sizable software library.
If nintendo is smart for the first time they will allow BC on the switch 2. There is a massive buy in on the switch and they will get a lot of people to move over to a switch 2 if their software works on it. If not its easier for a consumer to move to a new platform if they have to rebuy a lot of software anyway.
This is the same thing that valve does with steam. it's just a snow ball rolling down hill. How many people are willing to leave behind hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of software that they bought over the last 20 years that still works and is playable to move to a different store ? Its why the other stores out there struggle to catch up .
Even the iphone owes a lot of its success to the app store and the buy in from itunes. When it first launched it was a dud and apple had to cut hundreds off its price and bring out the app store to get it to sell. Then the ease of use of itunes music for so many was a big jumping on point for a lot of people.
If you think about it MS is in third place but even now pre activision it would be almost impossible for another company to even launch a console and over take MS. They would need a massive amount of internal developers or buy a ton of exclusive content but the amount of money a company would want for that exclusive content would be staggering because it would have to cover the loss sales that they 'd lose due to missing out on launching with 300m consoles. Then you'd have to at least compete with the current crop of MS exlusives as the lowest bar to entry. Then on top of that all the people who bought xbox ones that want to continue playing their old purchases. There would be very few companies that could to that. Most likely Tencent / Apple / Amazon/ Google and for Amazon / Google they would need to full invest in a way they never did before.
All that just to displace MS who is in last place. The bar continues to get higher and more expensive as you move on to Nintendo and Sony. For sony you'd be competing with a company that has almost 30 years of software , along with popular exclusives and consistently sells over a 100m consoles a generation.
So realistically what would MS need to do to stay competitive. Remember each generation its going to be harder to catch up to Sony. Each generation Sony adds more studios to their portfolio and can release more exclusives each generation. Each generation they get more lock in because people have bought more software and want to bring it along to their next console.
So MS could start up studios and grow them. But what is it now roughly 3-4 years for a triple a title ? Plus the time it takes to build out the studio with employees. So likely another generation would go by before any of the studios start to bear fruit. MS could buy studios already making games just like sony and they do but apparently people hate when MS does it. They would have to buy at least as many per generation as sony just to keep the status quo and would likely have to double the purchase rate over sony to catch up in terms of content. The other option is just to exit the console market and just release games on the pc . This is likely the worse option for gamers as there would only be two consoles on the market and innovation will stagnate.
my thoughts are simply that we aren't ever going to get a real 4th play in the gaming market because of the sheer amount of money it would require. However its very likely that we will go down to two players which is really bad for console gamers. A more competitive MS is the healthiest option for the console market.
I think this only applies if you want to compete in the traditional console games market, which, divided 4 ways the pie of the revenue may not be worth it with the risks being so monumental. The direction of games is not towards dedicated consoles, and the general direction is pointing towards streaming because, quite frankly, if you want to keep increasing the graphical fidelity of games but keep it contained to 300W watts, there is an obvious hard wall coming.
But having said that, I think companies looking into this business see the future as streaming as the number of devices opens up dramatically, and there is an equal playing field. That is where competitors should be slotting themselves in.
The challenge is of course, 2 fold, the first is the technology, and the second is getting the content onto streaming. The first will be solved over time, and that is a slow moving process as it has to run hand in hand with connectivity. The content strategy for cloud will be painful however, you need to put good content up onto streaming even if the technology is not yet ready. And so no game company wants to take a poor deal to put their games onto streaming and receive no revenue from it, but platform holders would be willing to eat those costs. Unfortunately, the most efficient route to do this is through ownership, paying licenses today to put content on streaming when it's not a real market is expensive and inefficient. This is a different story of course when streaming is healthy competitive market, then it's worthwhile to pay to have content onto streaming.
And then you have to additional challenge here that the current market leader is making marketing deals to ensure that marquee titles are being blocked from pricing models that are necessary for streaming. Geforce Now does not count, and I should be clear on that, because anyone who uses Geforce Now is just paying for streaming, you still need to go to Steam and purchase all your games and copy them to the GFN server in order to play them. And since Steam is a separate store, Nvidia doesn't care if GFN dies as a service, and neither does Steam, as they aren't responsible for refunding content back to users. Unlike what we saw with Stadia, refunds for all content where released to owners when they shut down the service, and you can see similar issues with both Sony or MS adopting this model - you don't want to do this because they are responsible for taking care of their entire platform end to end.
People are seeing the Game Pass model incorrectly, I've seen many (outside of this forum) pointing to the end of high quality AAA games, but it's fairly clear here that it is far from supplanting traditional gaming, especially when we have F2P models out there. Game Pass is a foundational model to cloud gaming, and we can see why Luna, Game Pass and PS Now are still alive, but Stadia died. They all offer the games with the streaming service, and if the service shuts down, no loss since they aren't paying for the license of the game, so no refunds.
Stadia may have died in this space, but Luna will be one to watch as Amazon studios continues to put more games out there on multiplatform, eventually with enough titles under their belt, as Disney did, they will move their content exclusive to their own service. They took good notes here on where Google screwed up. Third party only play no longer works like it used to back in the older generations. The current model for success is exclusive content which used to be inherent due to exotic hardware. But now with the way engines are designed to deploy anywhere, ie Unreal, then, it's really just about one thing, which is paying to keep content off other platforms, or paying to create your own content.
This is also why it's very difficult to supplant Sony as leader in this space. They are currently the leaders in this space for a variety of reasons, but mainly around execution. MS continues to build exclusive titles where many 3rd party titles compete and get lost in the sea of competition. If they take the 3rd party titles out of the market however, that creates a weird gap where Sony's library is not covered in this space (thus purchase Bungie) because they dedicate almost all their first party studios to single player experiences - Sony will be working to rectify this. While MS is looking to rectify it's lack of single player experiences.
The problem with single player experiences and cloud streaming? You can draw a crowd, but you can't keep them there longer than the game lasts. They don't want to build a model of subbing and unsubcribing. They also need to fill the streaming service with MP titles, and GaaS titles that will keep players playing there. Thus CoD -- thus ABK actually. They are probably the leaders, at least the top 3, in that space. Diablo, WoW, CoD, Overwatch... list goes on.
It is worthwhile to look at the merger for these reasons, and I've specified this many times over, cloud is the critical area to watch. While I know having ABK content on cloud will help accelerate cloud adoption, the question is: how quickly? And will it really have the lasting power to endure years of little cloud adoption to make the purchase necessary, but undeniably they will have a lot more studios to make content with.
A real interesting point here, we coin certain games as GaaS, but the traditional way that "As a Service" is defined is actually be appropriate for game subscription models.
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The problem with streaming is new companies into the video game market will face the same challenges as they would if they entered the console market. Sony and MS already have streaming services for games. Sony has been in that market for a decade now. Even nintendo has streaming games on the switch.
So with that said why would you sign up for eastmen cloud streaming with just third party games or maybe 1 smaller exclusive a year when you can sign up for Microsoft's cloud gaming ? or sony's ?
That is before you factor in stuff like other content the services can bring about. MS could offer bundles with their other services where you save some money. Lets say you are a m365 personal user perhaps there will be a bundle where you get that + game pass ultimate and safe a few dollars off the prices if you didn't bundle together. Or in my opinion sony has much better synergy here. What if they bundle with Crunchy roll or Bravia core or Mora Qualitas for their music streaming in some countries? If you use those products your even less likely to sign up for eastmen cloud streaming.
I think the beauty of game pass is that there are multiple ways to play the content you are paying for. If you have game pass you can stream on xcloud , you can game on your console , you can game on your pc. Stadia died because it was extremely limited to where and how you could play it.
Sony's weakness is in the fact that they dominate a single type of game which is 3rd person action games. Their library only really appeals to people who like their games. MS has problems executing on their releases and schedules but they offer a variety of content. If they can actually keep releasing titles on the same time scales as sony I actually think we would see them gain more traction in the market.
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Deleted member 11852
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I'd really like to hear from forum goers in other parts of Europe on the marketing of PlayStation and Xbox but no matter how good a product is, for it to develop or even maintain market position, it needs marketing. Coke is the worlds no. 1 soft beverage by a wide margin and Coca-Cola advertise constantly. I'm sure Coca-Cola and Apple aren't spending money on advertising because their money vaults are full. It's accepted as a necessary part of selling your brand.
I agree. The general shunning of PS3 at launch shows that people aren't going to buy something us because it is a PlayStation. PSP, Vita and PSVR also show that if Sony don't develop compelling products, they will struggle and all of those devices are PlayStation.
PS3 got cheaper, smaller and good exclusives came out. YLOD was a thing and I've seen estimates that the early consoles that it impacted had a failure rate as high as 10%, whereas when Microsoft caved under legal pressure, it was revealed the RRoD failure rates in 2009 were between 20% and 50% then that rose as time wore on. Interestingly, Microsoft only recently (December 2021) went on the record on RRoD. Everything prior to them was speculation or industry insiders.
The first source is Sony, so perhaps treated with some rise-tinted optimism! However the independent marketing firm's question was asking whether console owners are going to buy the same brand next. Then was presented as "brand loyalty", but the questions don't discern the motive.
For that the questions would need to be really targeted and specific, e.g. targeting at PS4 owners:
Q1. Would you consider an Xbox Series console instead of a PS5?
Q2. If you answered 'No' to Q1, explain why:
o I suck Sony's dick.
o Bill Gates is the Devil.
o Because I have a massive PS4 library, duh.
It's not enough to know what people have or will do, the motivation is what would reveal somebody as being brand loyal or not. There are many other factors that may influence a purchasing decision, such as the cost, backwards compatibility, the game library and services, ancillary features (Blu-ray, streaming, music etc), what your friends have, the local availability of the hardware, accessories and games, your general awareness of alternatives as options (i.e. marketing and promotion).
E.g. I'm not brand loyal to Apple but I'm heavily invested in macOS and iOS in terms software and time spent learning how to be really productive using the devices. It's not impossible for me to switch to Windows or Android, but there would eb a cost element to replace some software and there would be a significant time element in learning new UI, features, gestures etc. Going from PS4 to Series S/X can mean losing a considerable library library, whether bought or obtained through PS+ - likewise the reverse.
And this is what these ecosystems want. They want the value of ecosystem to build to a point where losing it is really undesirable.
The maltiplatform exprience was worse at the beginning. Later on it ranged from insignificant to identical and sometimes better. I know because I own both consles. The PS3 didnt have as much of an issue with YLOD as the XBOX had with the RROD. The RROD persisted even after MS supposedly revised their models. The XBOX's library of exclusives were few and lacklaster in comparison. Rise of the Tomb Raider was released in 2015 when the 360 was on its last legs. What difference did you expect it to make? Same with Titanfall. The worse online service, meh apart from online parties, cant say I was missing out much. Plus on PS3 it was free.
Your 2006 article was outdated, we have the course of sales, real and final numbers not just estimations and clickbait article titles. The other article you provided says 40% for PS and 30% for XBOX. Hardly the huge definitive brand loyalty that defines leaders. These percentages can change and are not hard coded into people's minds. Planning to buy isnt indication of brand loyalty really.
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