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curl-6 on 21 June 2019
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RolStoppable said:
COKTOE said:

That's an interesting thought. Things couldn't realistically get much worse for Xbox, so you may be right.

The downside to that scenario is that the X-Box would have had to, especially if it dropped in 2019, ride out the rest of the gen with a wildly inferior platform to the PS4-Pro, and they were already fairing poorly in direct comparisons to the original PS4. It's possible sales, and the brand may have suffered even more in skipping the X.

A new generation provides the chance for a proper reset of more than the sales units alone. Sacrificing the tail end of a generation in order to build towards the next generation is a tradeoff where a console manufacturer takes some small additional damage to an already lost generation in exchange for a potentially big payoff in the following generation. A recent example of this is the Wii U to Switch transition where Wii U's 2016 had few first party releases and no high profile ones, but in turn Switch's 2017 was just about the strongest first year lineup a console has ever had and that laid the foundation for a runaway success story.

Now it's important to mention that Nintendo used the reset to overhaul their image, the first step being a different branding for the console itself, because that instantly tells the market that the new console is different than what came before it. The repeated error that Microsoft has made is that they stick with the Xbox name, so consumers' perception and expectations carry over from one generation to the next. The Xbox name is good in the USA and the UK, but it's detrimental mostly everywhere else. It's a situation where Microsoft is too afraid to give up a benefit in a couple of countries for the chance to do better globally. While Scarlett has yet to get its final name, it's likely that it will be another Xbox and that will shove them in the same corner of a dominant USA and UK share of their total sales again. Their total sales may very well increase if they execute without any big errors, but when it comes to the question if the console can sell 100m+ units, it's easy to conclude that that is very, very improbable without a more balanced distribution of global sales.

Since the Xbox One was a series of blunders leading up to its launch and beyond, the bar is set very low for Microsoft to do better with Scarlett. It will be first and foremost a question of how much better and a lot of that also depends on what Sony does with the PS5. It won't be until this time next year that the information is out, so there's not any more I have to say on this topic.

I don't think the "Xbox" name has been irreparably tainted, just the "Xbox One" name.

If they're idiots and call Scarlett the "Xbox One Omega" or some shit then it's fucked, but I could see it finding success if they drop the "One" and make it clear this is an all new system rather than a continuation of the unpopular Xbone line.