Why the Xbox One is losing to the PS4, according to the guy who made Xbox matter

[greenmedic88]

I'm going to largely agree with all the points made.

As an outside industry observer, I'll say price was the first handicap the XBO had to deal with relative to the PS4 and that was entirely due to tethering Kinect to the only SKU.

MS could have taken a big loss on each unit by essentially giving Kinect away for free with a $399 MSRP, but loss leading was not the strategy MS nor SCEA wanted to play this generation. If they had, the XBO could potentially have had the perceived value lead over the PS4.

The only problem is that MS did a fairly poor job of convincing consumers why Kinect was so vital to the Xbox ecosystem and in retrospect, it appears it wasn't at all necessary, whereas it could have been the feature to distinguish it from the PS4.

Shifting away from the price handicap, there was clearly a PR problem with the DRM related always online and single user retail game policy. Restrictions without explanation of benefits only serves to make the competition look like the benevolent company with consumers' interests best in mind, regardless of whether that's the case or not. SCEA milked that for what it was worth.

Continuing with the initial marketing of the XBO, there was far too much focus on media functions (how many times was the word "TV" spoken during the initial product reveal presentation) allowing SCEA to counter by focusing on games with their product reveal.

Contributing to the initial comparisons was the performance/hardware gap which was largely substantiated by the difference in performance between 3rd party ports of the types of games consumers were buying consoles for. Charging $100 more for a package that performs less than its cheaper competition is a difficult proposition for any product.

Currently, the PS4 is largely coasting on momentum. MS has made far more improvements (corrections) with the XBO, addressing nearly all the shortcomings, but public perception remains largely unchanged. This is not to say that there won't be any shifts during the remainder of the 8th generation (the PS3 staged a successful comeback), but it's a large uphill battle at this point.