| d21lewis said: Well, you can't play sales. Kudos to Microsoft, though. While cleaning out my closet, I dug up an old issue of EGM about a week ago and in it, they pretty much called out their strategy. With the exception of a few snags, things seem to have gone their way. The guys know how to make smart business decisions. I'd argue that Sony has taken more risks and they haven't panned out for them. We need both risk takers and successful product for the industry to continue so, no matter who's actually on top, I'm glad we have 'em both. |
You have to acknowledge that there is a lot of subtlety under the surface of how these systems are designed from the operating system to the development tools and the technology used to build them. The Xbox 360 for instance is generally about half a frame ahead of the PS3 in latency (due to Blu Tooth vs RF) so when you take extra online latency into account the impression that Xbox Live is 'better' for many people could partially be founded on the lower latency of Xbox 360 games. If one system is 180ms and the other system is say 220ms taking into account network lag and you're waiting one more frame to update the picture then the former will 'feel' better than the latter even if you can't put it into words.
Another thing is gameplay by numbers. Games which have low controller latency (framerate + game code) tend to sell better than games which are much slower. So whilst you can have game critics engaging their front brains and telling us that game X is better than game Y because it is innovative you have a much wider audience using their limbic system saying that one game 'feels better' than another. So you can have two different answers depending on what part of the brain gets asked. Microsoft gets the basic psychology better than Sony so they can better hook into peoples addiction centers with things like achievements and avatars etc.
Tease.
