Xbox One's Problems Were "Predictable and Preventable," says Former president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division

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I do wonder sometimes about how much group-think happens when some corporate decisions are made. MS and Sony aren't the only big companies that have made bone-headed decisions which turned consumers off and lead to market failures, or at least severe market-share contractions. Even Nintendo's Wii U strategy was predictably bad going all in with a tablet controller, being that it was neither as innovative or as user friendly as the Wiimote. Though many of us saw the seeds of Nintendo's home console demise at exactly the same time some people were predicting Wii would achieve sales of 250 million and that Nitnendo home consoles would dominate for multiple generations. Any analysis of the games that were selling great and the games that were not selling great on Wii would tell you the Wii strategy was likely to have a short-term effect. And it turned out to be so short term it couldn't even sustain Wii as the dominant console on an annual sales basis for the entire generation.

MS made a similar mistake with Kinect. When you saw the sorts of games that were selling well with Kinect, and the fact that no core games could effectively transition to Kinect as the principle UI, it was clear that Kinect could never be a gamer-centric strategy and it would always only be a peripheral point of difference. It is also interesting to note that PS Move was arguably the best motion control tech for full adoption into core games, but for a number of reasons (including stupid copycat backlash shit), it failed to strike a chord with consumers and developers were unwilling to put effort into integrating PS Move into core games. It would be interesting to consider what effect CoD transitioning to PS marketing exclusivity would have had if it happened at the time PS Move was being launched. Making CoD playable with Move may have done a lot for the fortunes of PS Move. Some 3rd parties did integrate Move but not enough, and not in games that would give Move the chance to become popular with the mainstream. Bioshock Infinite is an example of a Move enabled game, and it is fun to play it with Move.

Then we had illumiroom that got some people salivating. Another quirky interesting technology, but hopelessly impractical in the consumer environment.

And that brings us to VR/AR. It seems like more game companies are supportive of these techs, but both of them have some major obstacles to overcome in order to become mainstream consumer devices. And I think they will both fail to overcome all of those obstacles. VR and AR are really cool ideas, and they capture the imagination, and when people play/use tech demos they like it a lot. But when people are faced with actually paying cash to own one of these devices they will turn away in large numbers. On this front MS is actually playing it smart. They are positioning AR as primarily not a consumer device and pretty much not at all a gaming device (even though they're demo's have included gaming, and they are firmly sitting on the sidelines with VR. And watching as Sony commits a lot of money to a device with a very uncertain chance of success.