Price, brand power, word of mouth and software. For everyone these are the things that grants you success. You can lack some elements if they are exceeded by others in return.
Lets look at them individually and compare the two companies.
Price: on even terms technically. When price parity exists people who cares a lot about this will check out other costs such as online fees and various other associated costs. Xbl gold has an MSRP of 60 dollars per year whereas ps plus has a price of 50. This might sound trivial but it does add up in the end when making the decision.
Brand power: the console bussines is comparatively hard to estimate each gen. Everone knows apple will sell the most phones no matter what the competition or they themselves offer. Console manufacturers cant get away with that. A huge amount of people still dont have any brand loyalty, but of course different regions some advantages over the other. For example north america has been much stronger supporters of the xbox brand per potential consumer than the rest of the world has been. Europe is strongly favoured towards playstation even when the x360 competed against ps3. What has changed from the 360 era is the DRM/always online debacle. It has hit everywhere around the world but it has hit the hardest in the US simply because the xbox fans was bigger percentage wise there. Look back and consider how much uproar it got. Everyone cursed microsoft and those who didnt stayed silent and didnt defend them because of the sheer amount of hate. Then think back at the reversals. I would estimate 1/10th of that activity to come back for the reversals. You can be damn sure there are still a bunch of people who doesnt know that xb1 plays used games or maybe they just heard some bad things which has discouraged them from purchase.
This leads me to word of mouth.
It can be the network effect the 360 enjoyed last gen or it could just be you visiting someone who has the system and speaks well of it in front of you. I would aegue this is the oldest and most efficient way of stealth marketing as you trust these individuals more than any commercial in this age where we have learned to zone out whenever being presented with an ad in order to maintain our sanity.
More ps4 owners = more possible word of mouth. This creates a snowball effect that only increases while the ps4 continues to outsell the xb1.
And lastly software. Notice i didnt say exclusives, because while those still matter, especially for the one lagging behind, the most important thing is 3rd party. Destiny directly sold more consoles than propably any exclusive title this gen. If you can get everything on your system then you can slow down on your own development. This is the main reason why the wii u struggles. Sure they have quality exclusives, but the wii audience is gone and so they only have us to look to. As we can see, not many non aligned fanboys will choose the system with only one game release every month (at the very best) what is keeping the wii u stabilized is its comparatively cheaper pricetag and the audience wanting to own multiple consoles. For most this is the console you get as supplement to your main console of choice. Word of mouth faded alongside the rise of the angry birds and the clashes of clans. I think you can directly compare how badly the wii u will sell by looking at how much tablet sales increase.
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