binary solo said:
Did you stop reading beyond the first sentence? Xb's immense growth compared to PS's sharp decline saw them sell more or less equal numbers, with PS3 being on the market a year less. That actually strongly demonstrates the strength of the PS brand, not its weakness. It's clear PS3 was the PS brands low water mark in hoe consoles but it still managed to sell better than Xbox 360. The simple fact that the PS brand is Sony's only consumer electronics brand that is worth anything now (no thanks to Vita) and Xbox is a sideshow in relation to MS's core business, and clearly becomming less important with the rapid rise of smartphones and tablets where the real battle for electronics dominance lives now, should have had a lot of professionals believe that Sony would produce a competetive machine and pull out all stops to ensure it made a good start to the generation. How could any credible anaylst believe that MS could be in any position to gain more traction in markets where PS3 won significantly over Xbox 360 when it was clear the main advantages 360 had over PS3 were almost certainly not going to apply this time around (1 year head start, significant price advantage, better online service)? If at the end of 2012 I was capable of analysing the situation and correctly predicting that PS4 was more likely to be number 1 over Durango it's clear that any real analyst would have come to the same conclusion and only the try hard, the imcompetent or the MS fan were confidently predicting a win for MS. There was really only 1 piece of luck with PS4, and that was the last minute drop in GDDR5 cost which allowed 8GB instead of 4. Things might have been very interesting with a 4GB GDDR5 machine vs an 8GB DDR3 + 32MB ESRAM machine. Perhaps the difference is I was using VGC data to draw some conclusions, while most professional analysts are probably as dismissive of VGC as Gaffers. When you've been around the VGC data since 2008 you can see patterns, trends and preferences in markets that lead to better quality forecasts, as long as you're able to put aside your personal console bias. Then again I made the call that Wii had no chance of beating PS2's record back when Wii was selling huge numbers and people were making wild claims about 200 million. I even said Wii would have a hard time reaching 120 million, though I said that when it was fairly clear 200 million was impossible. So perhaps I'm just superior to most analysts, including the professionals. Of course in respect of the Wii Pachter and I were somewhat more in agreement given he thought Wii was going to burn out without an HD upgrade. lack of HD wasn't mainly why I thought Wii would burn out. For me it was the very narrow base of the types of games that were selling well on Wii and the fact that PS3 and 360 were both selling very well in the face of Wii selling record numbers annually. long time gamers were chosing PS360, latter day casuals were picking up Wii. latter day casuals alone could never take a games console to LTD record sales. You need both long term gamers and casuals to break LTD records. If MS could spend its way to success then Zune would have killed iPod and Apple would not be bigger than MS right now. And left of centre political parties would never win elections. It's flat out stupid to make predictions about consumer behaviour based on relative financial strengths of companies until a company actually goes bankrupt. |
Take it down a notch there cowboy, I read your whole post, fact is simply that it's absolutely unscientific and no analyst would ever base his projection on something like that. The assumption that MS would expand and/or hold its advantage in NA while heavily investing in the European market to gain more ground over there, was the most reasonable to make back in 2012. The whole outcome that we have right now, while making me happy, is not one that was to be expected 2012 and if you did say it then that has more to do with your affliction to Sony/PS than with your ability to analyse these kinda situations, cause nobody could have predicted that giant fuck up by MS back then.
