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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Why the Xbox One is losing to the PS4, according to the guy who made Xbox matter

"Why the Xbox One is losing to the PS4, according to the guy who made Xbox matter"
This title is clickbait bullshit, nowhere does it give me Kaz Hirai's reason for why XBO is losing to PS4 -__-



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DRM had nothing to do with the XB1 being stomped by the PS4. I think others have said it clearly, the 360 lacked any real exclusives in the last 2 years leading up to the release of the XB1. Then you add the Kinect bundling and $100 price bump over PS4 and BOOM. The XB1 needed price parity at least at launch, after all the forum dwellers jumped on the "PS4 is more powerful than the XB1", M$ just plain misread the whole market worldwide.



It is near the end of the end....

The problem behind everything though is that they severely overestimated the brand strength of xbox.
They thought that brand would carry them past the hurdles, and they were wrong.
PS brand name kept the ps3 in business while it built a catalog. While xbox has a lot of fans, and diehard ones, they just don't have as many as ps does. Thinking they could get away with something ps was able to was the real mistake.



Landguy said:
DRM had nothing to do with the XB1 being stomped by the PS4. I think others have said it clearly, the 360 lacked any real exclusives in the last 2 years leading up to the release of the XB1. Then you add the Kinect bundling and $100 price bump over PS4 and BOOM. The XB1 needed price parity at least at launch, after all the forum dwellers jumped on the "PS4 is more powerful than the XB1", M$ just plain misread the whole market worldwide.

I largely agree with this, though I do think the 'no used games' news definitely added to the more substantial problems of $499 and the poor reputation of the 360 in the final couple of years.

Something I think can't be understated, and I remember arguing with people at the time, is the VAST increase in the power of social media.

I distinctly remember people saying 'nobody cares about performance', 'the most powerful console has never won', etc, after hearing the PS4 was going to have superior GPU and memory. The 8th gen consoles were the first to be launched in the environment of megabehemoth social media forces like Facebook and Twitter. And the fact that the $399 console ran the same games better than the $499 console was an easy thing to tweet/post about TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC. That is a massive difference compared to the relatively tiny number of people that frequent gaming forums in the big picture. The disastrous XB1 reveal got so much social media traction that it actually crossed over into the mainstream for a short time.



Obviously all of Microsoft's misteps were a large deal, but I really do believe the industry miscalculated Sony's overall brand-power with PlayStation. It's very large, and it means a lot to some people.



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mochachino said:

I think most people were still sore about being exploited on 360 and treated like a second class consumers after Xbox started chasing after that Wii casual money at the expense of the core and early adopters...who were already pissed from the RROD/dvd drive issues, and 13.6 gig HD, and ridiculously overpriced updgrade options...and no HDMI or WiFi. The list goes on.

Xbox division did an amazing job coming from Xbox original to 360, then spent the remainder of the gen destroying their goodwill among consumers. They're rebuilding it now but it cost them so much. They could have been dominate console brand by a large margin. Sony was on the ropes poised to become Sega or at best, have Nintendo sales. Xbox blew it.

That certainly describes me. I rushed out to by a 360, awesome games at the start. Yet then it broke, I bought a ps3, 360 broke again, cancelled live and I started playing multiplatform games on ps3. Why pay for online on a console that's a ticking timebomb. I did get a new 360 under warrenty, but still no wifi and a 20gb hdd. Meanwhile the new exclusives dried up, 360 without gold made you feel more and more like a third class custumor with each UI update. (I could not even see or access the HD screenshots I made in Forza Horizon...) Plus I was not interested in Kinect.
Meanwhile I had signed up for ps+ which made the decision to buy ps4 first even easier. Well WiiU first, it was out a year earlier. Buying 2 consoles in the same year is a bit much. If XBox One had come out a year later I would probably have bought it day 1 as well on hype. With all the changes going on I decided to wait and now I still don't have one as I have too much of a backlog on ps4 already. Going head to head cost XBox my sale and currently I rather wait for a slim revision at max $300 with a game. 1Tb Forza 6 bundle is $450 here, back to matching ps4 in price... (except newer game and 1tb instead of 500gb)

MS gambled that people would not give up their live acount and collected achievements and stick with them no matter what. They gambled wrong.



I'm going to largely agree with all the points made.

As an outside industry observer, I'll say price was the first handicap the XBO had to deal with relative to the PS4 and that was entirely due to tethering Kinect to the only SKU.

MS could have taken a big loss on each unit by essentially giving Kinect away for free with a $399 MSRP, but loss leading was not the strategy MS nor SCEA wanted to play this generation. If they had, the XBO could potentially have had the perceived value lead over the PS4.

The only problem is that MS did a fairly poor job of convincing consumers why Kinect was so vital to the Xbox ecosystem and in retrospect, it appears it wasn't at all necessary, whereas it could have been the feature to distinguish it from the PS4.

Shifting away from the price handicap, there was clearly a PR problem with the DRM related always online and single user retail game policy. Restrictions without explanation of benefits only serves to make the competition look like the benevolent company with consumers' interests best in mind, regardless of whether that's the case or not. SCEA milked that for what it was worth.

Continuing with the initial marketing of the XBO, there was far too much focus on media functions (how many times was the word "TV" spoken during the initial product reveal presentation) allowing SCEA to counter by focusing on games with their product reveal.

Contributing to the initial comparisons was the performance/hardware gap which was largely substantiated by the difference in performance between 3rd party ports of the types of games consumers were buying consoles for. Charging $100 more for a package that performs less than its cheaper competition is a difficult proposition for any product.

Currently, the PS4 is largely coasting on momentum. MS has made far more improvements (corrections) with the XBO, addressing nearly all the shortcomings, but public perception remains largely unchanged. This is not to say that there won't be any shifts during the remainder of the 8th generation (the PS3 staged a successful comeback), but it's a large uphill battle at this point.



I'm not convinced brand played as much of a factor as some believe.

Look at the number of consumers who went from the PS2 to the XB360. Now look at the number of consumers who went from the XB360 to the PS4.

I'm not going to say that the gaming consumer is fickle; they're generally well informed and capable of making a decision based upon something more than loyalty to a particular service or brand name.



Fei-Hung said:
It was interesting him saying the 360 team weren't behind a lot of the decision making. It seems odd that they would put a make shift team behind the new console.

One thing that Sony hasn't seen coming so far this gen is how software will transform the X1 and give its successor a headstart in terms of BC, Windows integration, Windows ecosystem across devices and cloud computing.

It will be interesting to see how Sony respond to some of these. I still think Sony need to partner with Google as they are behind it terms of expertise when it comes to software.


Sony has always been a hardware company. Microsoft will always have the edge when it comes to software and online infrastructure. 



greenmedic88 said:
I'm not convinced brand played as much of a factor as some believe.

Look at the number of consumers who went from the PS2 to the XB360. Now look at the number of consumers who went from the XB360 to the PS4.

I'm not going to say that the gaming consumer is fickle; they're generally well informed and capable of making a decision based upon something more than loyalty to a particular service or brand name.

People in the US go with whatever product is considered "cool". NES, Genesis, PS1, PS2, 360... now PS4. What do they all have in common? All of them were considered the "cool" or "hip" console and all of them won the US marketshare.