How The Xbox One Helped Sell The PS4
Here at Forbes, we’ve been spending some time trying to answer a question indirectly posed by Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida: how is the PS4 possibly selling so well? The console’s 10 million sales are so impressive that they’ve even made Sony a bit nervous. How do you plan for a future if you don’t quite understand the present?
Erik Kain wrote about how the essential boringness of the PS4 has helped it with the hearts of gamers: to him, the core market didn’t want any of the experiments being played by Microsoft and Nintendo so much as it just wanted a plain and simple, no-frills console, which is exactly what Sony gave them. Mark Rogowsky wrote about a few different factors, from the fact that the PS4 is a relative bargain to the fact that an extra-long console cycle created a swell of pent-up demand. In my last post, I talked a bit about how Apple has made us much more comfortable spending money on upgrading our electronics, and how the minimalist PS4 formed the perfect combination of exciting new technology and subtle status symbol. That all still holds, but there’s another key piece in this still-nascent story: the PS4′s chief competition, the Xbox One.
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Whenever you write about the PS4′s success, you end up with a certain suite of comments railing on Microsoft and the various missteps surrounding its Xbox One launch. The comments don’t even seem particularly concerned about the PS4 itself, instead setting up Sony’s console as the inevitable perfect counterpart to and Xbox One deemed evil and wrong. To them, it’s a binary market where the success of one console is inevitably tied to the failure of the other. Also, Nintendo, sometimes.
I grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts, roughly equidistant from New York and Boston, and for this reason split (though not down the middle) between Red Sox and Yankees fans. I was a Red Sox fan, sure. But more importantly, I hated the Yankees (paraphrasing myself from last year).
While the Xbox One’s missteps can’t fully explain the PS4′s runaway success, the “console war” plays a huge part in the relative success of both systems. Just like a sports rivalry feeds rabid fans on either side, Sony’s successful capitalization on the Xbox One’s early missteps fed its own fanbase far more than the company could have on its own. More than that, it gave the console race a narrative that anyone paying even a small amount of attention to the video game world could latch on to. Xbox One vs. PS4 became the dominant news story of the entire industry, and that raised awareness for all involved. The fact that Sony’s arguments were ultimately more compelling — no confusing frills or Orwellian tendencies, lower price, same exciting next-gen gaming — swung that narrative towards the PS4. Every time the Xbox One’s trials ended up in the news, it was an indirect ad for the PS4.
For comparison, we can think about the Wii U, which launched without any competition and had to raise any excitement on its own.
It’s important to remember that the Xbox One is doing just fine in comparison to past console launches, though the continuing success of the PS4 is still a major threat. The console war narrative benefited Microsoft too. But Sony expertly exploited all of the Xbox One’s weaknesses and turned the narrative in its favor and reaped the rewards. By the time January rolled around, even an Xbox One box on a store shelf was enough to remind people just how hard it was to find a PS4.
The release of two major consoles within days of each other was an uncommon moment in videogame history, and unlikely to be repeated in quite the same way. This sort of hype doesn’t last, unfortunately. Lucky for Sony, it will probably run out of steam just around the same time there are enough excellent current-gen games to justify an upgrade.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2014/08/21/how-the-xbox-one-helped-sell-the-ps4/
