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Landsharkk on 23 February 2013
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Without responding to everything in this thread I'm going to say a couple of things.

1) Paying for Xbox Live vs free PSN. When you look at it from a business/investor perspective, which company has been successful with their business strategy? Note that Sony and their Playstation has been losing money for a long time. Meanwhile, Microsoft and their Xbox is making a profit.

Think about that.

Do you think Sony will continue to do business at a loss while giving away PSN for free, all the while their competition continues to be profitable and is charging for online service AND selling more consoles/increasing their customer count? Sony has to make a change and I have a feeling that removing features from the free PSN and adding them to the paid subscription of PSN+ is going to be one of them. Simple fact is Sony cannot continue doing what they've been doing and still stay in the game console business.

Why does Microsoft charge for Xbox Live? Because they are smart and want to make a profit. Why doesn't Sony charge for online gaming as well? Because they haven't figured out how to make a profit yet.


2) Time exclusives. This whole argument is moot. BOTH consoles have timed exclusives, so there's really no argument here. Btw, have any of you actually looked to see how many real exclusives both consoles have? I have (I can't find my source right now), but you'd be surprised that the number of exclusives between both consoles is almost even.


3) The big picture. I haven't seen anyone mention or discuss what I like to call 'the big picture'. While it seems to be true that Sony continues to push for the hardcore gaming crowd, Microsoft and their Xbox continues to push for the 'everyone' crowd. Microsoft has never removed any ability of the Xbox to play all of the most popular games out there. What they have done is expanded their target market in a big way.

Personally, if I was an investor (publisher, developer, etc) and I looked at both consoles, I'd lean more towards MS and the Xbox simply because they have a wider range of audience/customers. And Microsoft's customers don't just stop with the Xbox, because the Xbox is tied into (and in some cases hardcoded into) Windows OS (did we all forget that 80% of the world's computers are running Windows? Sony can't compete with that kind of marketing power), Tablets, smartphones, etc.

When we look at existing games that are multiplatform on both PS3 and Xbox360, we see that almost every single one of them sells better on the Xbox 360 (even the charts here on VGchartz show this to be true). If you are a developer looking at next gen, don't you think that's going to have an influence on which console you side with?

Microsoft is looking to the future and expansion of gaming on a constant basis, where it seems Sony is narrowing their market to the niche of hardcore gamers only. Microsoft already has cross-device gaming, cloud gaming, etc. Once again it seems Sony is still playing catch-up with Microsoft. It's like a two steps forward, one step back scenario for Sony.