Arkaign said:
Where have you been? #1 : Disaster at launch. Inarguably, the Xbox One was severely harmed by it's reveal and initial DRM shock, and this drove the masses away, leaving the core Xbox fans to give them an okay front-loaded number, but 2014 has largely been a disaster for them sales-wise. Losing 2 to 1 globally was not what they planned. #2 : Bad Console Design. A huge VCR looking thing with a chunky external power supply, yeah it's not pretty to look at. And they haven't been without issues either (Nintendo is the most reliable of course over Sony and Microsoft). #2A : Difficult to develop for and less powerful than PS4. Indisputably. The architecture is both more complex AND is coupled to a significantly slower GPU fed by significantly slower memory. To argue this is insanity. It's not a secret, and it's not up for debate. #3 : See #2. Clearly true. #4 : Only true for the launch period if you ignore Kinect like almost everyone has by now. Now they have price parity, so #4 only true really from Nov '13 to June '14. #5. Only moderately popular in US and UK, it's a near total disaster elsewhere, as their tiny marketshare is borderline irrelevant. China @ sub 100k I guess you could argue, but what's that % of globally. Not much. #6. Absolutely true of course. Same time period within a scant few days. Unless you could the areas they insulted with 'Tier2' status while waiting for "localization" that wasn't even needed due to Kinectless. |
1. Disaster at launch: Over priced their console that was missing promissed features and had no killer games at launch. Priced at 499 and 599 and still losing money, gamers were expected to get second jobs to afford it.
2. Bad console design (hardware): Despite being a year late it had similar if not worse performance than its competitor, with many devs studios expected to work overtime just to port games from PC and competing consoles
3. Bulky console: It looked like a sealed BBQ and was massive
4. More expensive: See #2
5. More popular in one area: Other than Europe, the console didn't sell very much anywhere else for the first few years
6. Same launch year as a competitor: Wii.
See what I did there? Seriously, you can spin these arguments for every console that wasn't very successful.
As far as the Saturn:
1. Saturn launch disaster was completely different than Xbox disaster (or PS3s)
2. Bad console architecture (not design) - Saturn and Xbox one bad architecture are in a different league. You could make an Xbox one game. Only issues devs are having is because its less powerful than PS4 and they are trying to keep performance at par. Saturn on the other hand needed the programming elite to make games run properly
3. Saturn didn't require a power brick and wasn't much bulkier or uglier than other console at that time. Also it was 10 times more reliable than PS1
4. Yes it was more expensive. You win this one Jack!
5. Lots of consoles do better in one area but Saturn got outsold by PS1 4:1 in Japan. It failed...everywhere. Xbox may even eventially outsell PS4 in USA. Quite a difference
6. Most consoles launch with a competitor around the same timframe. Its like saying sky is blue and not really an argument that proves anything... you may as well argue that both were back with white variants and had disk based games.
