It no longer makes sense to frame this generation's sales in terms of Xbox One "winning" or "losing" versus PS4.

Publishers are compelled to make every major third party game for both if they ever want to make money. There will be the occasional exclusive but it will be about a specific niche served by one console that can be done on lower budgets (JRPGs) or with extremely large financing deals (Titanfall). It's no longer possible to put a global major franchise on one or the other just for artistic or continuity reasons.

Therefore, all your favourite games WILL come to your platform of choice, and your console WILL survive for as long as the other one does. Winning in sales numbers does nothing to ensure that you recieve the few exclusives, because they're about which first party is willing to pay up. The relative sales numbers will not affect your gaming experience for this generation in any way.

The real fight this generation is against disinterest. The real threat to the games you love making it to your chosen console is that they become financially unviable to bring to ANY platform. If games like Call of Duty and Assassins Creed continue to decline in sales with their next few installments, third parties will seriously look at cutting back on HD development, just like Square Enix is already doing according to their Annual Report.

When the sales figures come out, whether your console has won or lost against the other one has no value to you. Look for the overall health of the industry: hardware sales compared to this point in last gen, software sales compared to past series entries (especially for those franchises just outside the top tier), and most importantly quarterly earnings statements from third parties.

What good is it that your console beat the other one if all the third parties go mobile?

I can finally quit spending money on new games and focus on clearing my backlog.

Buy Theif people!! An old IP that has been rebooted, a new IP to some. What we gamers were begging for last gen!! Get on it!

Sorry mate! Sort of the same point. Assassin's Creed and CoD will be fine. Something will just replace CoD, if not soon, eventually. Like the Guitar Hero craze before it, the Tony Hawk games before them, so on.. I think it's the smaller games that need the support. Good points though.

So it's more like WiiU vs Everyone Else?

That's true from a third party support standpoint, if only because developers are already too invested in both platforms to drop either of them. Even if the Xbone were to tank, it would be an early life PS3 situation where it's similar enough to the competing console that it's able to piggyback off of the fact that they're essentially treated as one SKU.

On the other hand, I see a lot of value in Microsoft taking a serious drubbing. Not only for all the terrible policies that they were forced to walk back, but also for the ones they've continued with - namely, cramming $60 retail titles with mobile game levels of IAPs. Fuck that shit. If that's the future of console gaming, I hope all third parties do go mobile.

PC vs Console? Gaming vs The World?

The Xbox One is selling less than the PlayStation 4, and now all of the sudden its all about the games. Deal with it. It's always been all about the games even when an Xbox console was outselling a PlayStation one. And even then console unit sales were being discussed, and there is no difference about that now. For some, the 800 pound gorilla is the success of the PS4 over the Xbox One thus far and would do most anything to avoid facing it.

I think companies that spam out entries in series every year simply have to accept that declines will come eventually.

Let's look at R* on the other hand....they spend years working hard and it seems to pay off.

GTAV has become the best selling in the series, GTAIV legged its way up to 25 Million shipped too.

Companies should become a bit more humble once more!

Oh so Titanfall is only one Xbox? Is that like how Project spark is only on Xbox? What about Alan Wake, Left4Dead, all the Battlestations, All the Fables, some Halo's, Gears of War, Mass Effect (oops guess that's on all now huh) & Alan Wake? 

So you look at the last 4 years of Xbox 360's "exclusives" and don't feel ripped off? Like microsoft dropped support 4 years ago despite raking in 2.75 billion per year on XBL + revenue from ads on home page? 

Did you even bother to look at the top games of 2013? Not 1 xbox game in the top 10 NOR any honorable mentions. 

Not to mention all the free exclusive content in AAA multi plats on PS3 & PS4 in addition to all the free games via PS+. 

I was hoping that sleeping dogs was a sign of good things to come for 360 games with gold but looks like that was just a pipe dream. Microsoft seems intent on costing the most and delivering the least all generation. 

Sad really. 

Yes?