| greenmedic88 said: ... if the current sales trends remain consistent (it helps to think of sales in terms of overall marketshare percentages), the XB1 will continue to fall behind the PS4 at a pretty significant rate. By December 2014, the XB1 could start looking like an also ran product if the prices remain the same and there is nothing compelling to justify the additional cost. |
And if PS4's lead continues to grow, with XBone sales dropping off disproportionately after initial enthusiast/early adopter demand, PS4 will gain additional advantage and sales just from the "buy what your friends have/play" dynamic. MS was also able to extend their initial lead last-gen because their major advantage in install base meant they had the bigger game library and continued to attract more 3rd parties well into the gen, even after PS3 reached it's "turning point" it still had to make up lost ground.
But again, there is no reason to think this rumor is true. There has been a flurry of news about leaks from MS, and those leakers' identity being discovered by MS. Selectively providing false info to suspected leakers is the obvious way to prove they are the leaker. Dropping the BluRay drive would itself not save a signifigant amount of cost, certainly not $100. While it might prevent 2nd hand sales and thus boost long term profit, that would also destroy MS' retail partners' profits and create major problems in relations there... when MS is certainly relyin on retail partners right now to keep sales solid.
Both Sony and MS can be expected to drop prices in tune with reductions in production cost... Last I read, this gen should be able to do so quicker and more often than last gen, due to the basic hardware being very similar to standard PC hardware. CPU/GPU fab continues to progress, and they both should switch to a smaller process node sooner rather than later. That will help both of them sell more, just because more consumers are open to a reasonably priced console (and one with more games by that time). That aspect doesn't really affect the proportional share of each console though, and as long as MS retains Kinect that will be a disproportionate restraint on reductions in production cost. Incidentally, Sony just bought a memory producer so should soon be able to produce GDDR in-house, making any MS advantage in DDR vs. GDDR less relevant.
