Do you think Xbox One can win UK this generation?

[Arkaign]

The gap will get wider due to social dynamics.

This is the first generation where Facebook/Twitter are ubiquitous, and social media trending is pretty heavily in the PS4's corner. And more than ever before, groups of friends/family like to play on the same system so they can play online together. PS4's early inertia is just millions of more reasons for new customers to buy a PS4 rather than an XB1.

Add to that the plethora of upcoming cross-gen games, which will almost certainly have a chilling effect on XB1 sales, as it's basically guaranteed for most of them to look better on PS4. Even if the difference is something like 720p vs 900p, 900p vs 1080p, that's bad press for Microsoft, and makes the XB1 look like a bad value even at the same price.

It isn't like the old days when a few people would notice differences between 360 and PS3 ports and talk about it, it's website headlining stuff these days, and with FB/Twitter sharing, news spreads quickly. It looks a bit daft to pay $60 for the same game on your $400 console and have a lower-quality version.

Also think of the release schedule. Titanfall was THE big release meant to carry the XB1 to the fall, something to make it stand out, and it only bought the XB1 about 2 weeks of boost. The gap will widen as the months go by, and XB1 looks doomed to suffer a thousand cuts along the way.

Only something beyond amazing at E3 could slow or reverse what seems inevitable at this point : relegation to a permanent 2nd place for the generation. Only the US/UK are even in play now, the other relevant markets are locked up by massive margins in favor of PS4, and the unlaunched markets even if they went 100% in favor of XB1 are too small to be of much use (and of course that's exceedingly unlikely, it would be earth-shattering news to even see a 50% marketshare in such markets, with 20-25% probably best-case for those).

This was all decided by a series of colossal errors from Microsoft :

(1)- DRM and an always-online policy. Even announcing such garbage was idiocy, but sitting on it as long as they did was outright insanity. They blew their entire E3 by now reversing it day 1 hour 1 with a "We listened, it's gone, now here are the games!". The amount of negative feedback from this can't be measured, and it's still being felt long after it was dropped.

(2)- Bundled Kinect. Terrible timing. Millions of Kinect1 were sold, but most of those users were indifferent or regretted their purchases later because of the lack of games and fundamentally gimmicky nature of the thing. Which leads us to :

(3)- High Price. Being that the Kinect showed little perceived value to the average gamer, the $499 price seemed genuinely over-reaching, particularly without a bundled game for launch. Including a voucher for a free launch game with purchase of XBLG would have softened that half-grand a fair bit, and made for good PR. But even so, $499 still seemed brutal when considering :

(4)- The hardware is fundamentally limited in contrast to their main competition, whose product was 20% less expensive at launch. It's not a trivial gap, the combination of a weaker GPU with dramatically slower memory is a bitter pill coming off the heels of the exceptionally well balanced 360. And their main excuses for being more was :

(5)- Being sold as an 'all-in-one' machine for entertainment, despite glaring weaknesses and the obvious fact that non-gamers are never going to drop $500 on a giant extra box that gives them nothing (other than gaming) than what competing products at a fraction of the cost run these days.

In short, if Sony could have directed Microsoft's actions, they couldn't have done much of a better job in destroying the good will and consumer loyalty built up after years of success with the 360. A series of arrogant, short sighted, blundering decisions have made it all but impossible for the Xbox brand to be a leader anywhere this generation, and actually risk the brand as a viable one through this generation.

Best case?

~45% of US/UK markets, irrelevant rest of world.

Worst case?

~35-40% of US/UK markets, irrelevant rest of world + dropoff in attach rate (multi-console owners, the ones with the deepest pockets and attach rate) will be ever less likely to buy XB1 multiplats as the gen moves along).