Xbox One vs PS4: Spencer Hates the Console War

[binary solo]

d21lewis said:
I'm kind of tired of the console wars, too. I actually wish we could get to where the movie and music industry is--one platform for everything and upgrades it every five years. Like Phil said, make it about the games again.

Soooo PC gaming then. Interesting statement that he wants people to be proud of the "piece of plastic" they own, which is hopefully Xbox. OK well when you want people to be that emotionally connected to your machine the console war is exactly what you get. So he's being a little disingenuous there, and elsewhere. But is it any different to any other consumer turf wars that happen? Cars, motorcycles, phones, computer operating systems (Apple, vs Windows, vs Linux), sports teams (I mean look at football hooliganism in Europe, how bad is that? At least you don't see all in brawls between fanboys at E3). It's basically commercial manipulation of the tendancy towards tribalism, which pervades all cultures, there's us and then there's them and us is superior, and them hate us for being better. Phil might personally dislike the console wars, but he's not translating that into different business practices. If he really hated the console wars he'd get MS out of that business. After all, Xbox isn't making MS money and Xbox is not as trategically relevant to MS's core business as when they first decided to get into consoles. So why be in the console business when there's no logical reason to be there? Or do they still need to be there to shore up the position of DirectX? But if course if it's a defensive strategy to maintain the market position of DirectX then they're not in consoles for the gamers, are they? But we're fooling ourselves if we think any of these companies are in it for the gamers. They're in it for our money. They have no real interest in us as gamers. And how do they make money? By selling their stuff to us. And how do they sell their stuff to us? Positive marketing/PR AND negative marketing/PR. Is MS engaged in negative marketing/PR? Yes of course it is. What's the effect of negative marketing? Console wars.