Does Sony win every generation by default?

[Nate4Drake]

Intrinsic said:

I have to agree that your opinion seems somewhat naive. Maybe thats not the right word, maybe myopic?

First off there are a lot of "ifs" in your theory, funny thing is; if you wanna run by that logic then every victory across every feild was based on the fact that this wouldn't have been the case if something else wasn't.

The problem with that is that these things (especially with consoles) don't happen overnight and aren't spur of the moment decisions. Lots of planning goes into these things. I can gaurantee you that any company that is spending billions in R&D and manufacturing is taking what they are doing seriously. The foundations of there strategies may be collectively flawed, but they took what they were doing seriously regardless. 

If one company succeeds and becomes more successful than the rest, its unfair to trivialize their achievements by saying eg. "Sony PS1 wouldn't have won if nintendo put a disc drive in their console instead of a catridge". Fundamentally, that statement, in hindsight may be very true, but both companies had a vision as to where they saw their consoles going, one was right and one was wrong so one won and one lost. That is basically how everything works.

Take your MS exacple for instance, you say MS should have taken making the XBO dev friendly as a priority. What MS did is basically make a direct iteration of 360 2.0. The took every hardware aspect of the 360 and directly improved on it and improced on their cooling to arrive at the XBO. The XBO is basically what a 360 would have been if it was made in 2013. Its as easy to develop for as the 360 was to develop for, the reason it looks like they have done something "wrong" now, is just that the PS4 is not only easier to develop for than a PS3, its also easier to develop for than the XBO. MS made remarkable hardware with the XBO taking into account factors that they felt would define the design of their architecture. And sony did the same.

The simple truth here is that if comparing the PS4/XBO, it just goes to show one thing, sony are just all round beter at making hardware (this should be expected). Sony has always made great playstation hardware, their hardware has just never before now put how games are actually made first. For the first time, sony and MS set out to make the same kinda hardware, no naturally the company better at making hardware would shine here. So should we say, XBO will be winning now if sony weren't as good hardware manufacturers?

mmm, 360 was a monster piece of hardware for a console released in Nov 2005 ! The combination Xenon and ATI's Xenos was something impressive, superior to any PC released at the same time, considering how much it was powerful, balanced and efficient, and all this in a 'close environment=console' ! Don't even compare that monster of XBox 360 with this current underpowered piece of hardware of XBox One(compared with 360).

But I might understand other points you made. The fact is Sony got stronger with PS4 and MS got weaker with XOne.  360 had several strong points VS PS3, most of all in the first 3 years : 1) very powerful, balanced and friendly to develop for piece of hardware=better multiplatform games. 2) Released 1 full year before PS3 in NA and Japan and 16 months before in Europe ---> 360 had already a very strong line up when PS3 was released. 3) much cheaper than PS3.

Do you see how many advantages MS lost This Gen with XOne ?!  This is the key point; Sony got stronger and MS weaker.  

I'm not saying XBone is bad; OMG it will deliver a great game experience, as any new console. Halo5 will be impressive I'm sure.   I just believe MS should do more after that jewel of XBox 360, only this :)