Lack of exclusive content

Focus on Kinect Garbage games and telling lies how they will play like real hardcore Exclusives

Taste in games of the Community is an important point too.
Microsoft had the luck that CoD was around when they needed it combined of course with being the only american console around.
A war game+american console in a war hungry country = profit

But it looks like CoD is getting slowly more uninteresting even for the little kids who buy those copy+paste games every year.
You can see how good other genres did in the last 2 years after they were all nearly dead.
People all over the world care for other things again - If Sony can keep up their great work with exclusives of DIFFERENT Genres with great story telling and innovative gameplay even 360 Fans will look over to it as it is happening already.
Microsoft can't keep up with the yearly releases of their 3-4 franchises they have combined with those Kinect shovelware.
But next Gen they won't be able to secure 3rd Party Exclusives(especially not those from Japan) cause Sony won't make the same mistakes again with the high price point,late release and an architecture that costs to much time and money to understand for studios that aren't 1st Party.

Keeping Halo fresh and new.

attract core gamers interested in next kinect

Lack of exclusives

Can't think of any. They're on their way to win next generation.

They need to do something to show people that they can trust launch time frame Xbox hardware again. That's the only big hurdle I can think of. Japan is irrelevant imho.

O.T. I don't think exclusives are all that important anymore for the simple fact Sony would have wiped the floor with MS and Nintendo.

MS biggest obstacle is not losing money on the Xbox during it's first years

steve ballmer

sony doesn't really have more exclusives as microsoft, i believe the xbox library is even bigger. sony had more "core" games with high quality the last years but looking at the first years and about kinect (which is important for some people even if not for us) i believe it's not as big of a deal as people always say if you look at the average customer. and i count games which are on one console and pc also as excluisve since that is not a big reason for most gamers, most who play on console don't really play on pc.

and i'm pretty sure one of the reasons why nintendo was so succesful was because of the exclusives. nintendo is wiping the floor with microsoft and sony if it comes to the importance of their exclusives for the average gamer. important exclusives doesn't mean "games some guys on internet forums see as most  important games". mario and the games with him alone are as important as everything sony or microsoft have (or almost). that was at least like that this gen with the "500" games including mario. just imagine nintendo with all the multi-plat games sony and microsoft get and their own stuff...

(i'm exaggerating little bit on purpose)