Exclusives aren't consumer-friendly but they shift boxes. Everyone knows if you want to play a Mario game you need a Nintendo.
The exclusives ship has sailed for the Xbox now so the best they can do is try to compete with the new Steam Machine with what will essentially be a PC and allow all storefronts.
It seems Valve has gone for an entry-level machine while Xbox is going for a premium one so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Just another data point to the unbelievable strategic failure of MS in ceding the mobile market so early on. Imagine a world where we had portable devices capable of natively playing Direct3D games from the beginning.
Branding surely played a role too, microsoft is constantly upping the ante on naming things as terribly as possible. I'm an avid gamer who follows gaming news and I couldnt tell you the difference between an xbox series s vs xbox one vs. xbox series aeiou and sometimes y. It's almost as bad as .net framework -> .net core -> uh.. lets just call it .NET actually that won't be confusing for anybody
The article mentions the significant impact of the failure of the XBox One but then goes on to lay the ultimate blame on smartphones in the last sentence (and headline). I don't agree. Playstation and Nintendo have both successfully navigated the smartphone-centric competitive landscape with different strategies.
The XBox business never recovered from the XBox One - which was a huge fail on almost every dimension. And that was the worst generation to fail on - because PS4 didn't fail. While PS4 wasn't perfect, it didn't have the critical issues PS3 did (high cost, extremely difficult to program, reliability). It was also the generation when the console business stabilized and platform ecosystems (subscriptions, online-only games, backward-compatibility) greatly increased user loyalty and platform lock-in.
While the XBox Series X generation returned to hardware, cost and feature parity (or close enough), Playstation had already pulled away enough and thanks to social stickiness (friends buy what other friends have), any lead compounds. Also - while it's a more minor issue - I have to mention... after screwing up the "XBox One" name (yeah, calling the third generation "One" won't confuse anyone), they screwed up again naming the next generation (WTF does "XBox Series X" even mean? What other "Series" are there?).
> Robbie Bach (Chief Xbox Officer): I said, okay, well then, let’s not do it.
> Ed Fries (VP, Game Publishing): And then somebody says, “What about Sony?”
> Jeff Henshaw (Software Design): Microsoft had owned the den and the office. And the thought of Sony owning the rest of the home is offensive to Bill [Gates].
> Ed Fries: Bill kinda pauses, and he thinks, and he says… “I think we should do this.” And Ballmer’s like, “yeah, we should do this!” And then they start getting excited and it starts going back and forth. “We should do this!” “We should let these guys do this!”
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that Microsoft and Google were so bent on competing with each other for its own sake (Bing, ChromeOS) that they allowed Apple to dominate the next generation of computing with the iPhone. This seems like another part of the same story.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 31.0 ms ] threadYes, the ps5 has sold like 85 M units, so it has the larger market share, but the xbox is "killed"? Please.
> It could generate real-time graphics far beyond anything ever seen before.
No. The ps2 was on par with a budget pc.
The exclusives ship has sailed for the Xbox now so the best they can do is try to compete with the new Steam Machine with what will essentially be a PC and allow all storefronts.
It seems Valve has gone for an entry-level machine while Xbox is going for a premium one so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out.
The XBox business never recovered from the XBox One - which was a huge fail on almost every dimension. And that was the worst generation to fail on - because PS4 didn't fail. While PS4 wasn't perfect, it didn't have the critical issues PS3 did (high cost, extremely difficult to program, reliability). It was also the generation when the console business stabilized and platform ecosystems (subscriptions, online-only games, backward-compatibility) greatly increased user loyalty and platform lock-in.
While the XBox Series X generation returned to hardware, cost and feature parity (or close enough), Playstation had already pulled away enough and thanks to social stickiness (friends buy what other friends have), any lead compounds. Also - while it's a more minor issue - I have to mention... after screwing up the "XBox One" name (yeah, calling the third generation "One" won't confuse anyone), they screwed up again naming the next generation (WTF does "XBox Series X" even mean? What other "Series" are there?).
> Ed Fries (VP, Game Publishing): And then somebody says, “What about Sony?”
> Jeff Henshaw (Software Design): Microsoft had owned the den and the office. And the thought of Sony owning the rest of the home is offensive to Bill [Gates].
> Ed Fries: Bill kinda pauses, and he thinks, and he says… “I think we should do this.” And Ballmer’s like, “yeah, we should do this!” And then they start getting excited and it starts going back and forth. “We should do this!” “We should let these guys do this!”
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that Microsoft and Google were so bent on competing with each other for its own sake (Bing, ChromeOS) that they allowed Apple to dominate the next generation of computing with the iPhone. This seems like another part of the same story.