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Replicant on 19 September 2018
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Zekkyou said:

Replicant said: 

I can definitely follow you on this as well. Early this gen, Sony and Microsoft could've done a better job attracting gamers that gradually migrated to PC gaming by having a stronger library as you say and stronger hardware capable of delivering a stable 60FPS (that seems to be a demand from many of my friends on PC).

Though, stronger hardware would've made the consoles more expensive and to some degree less accessible to the broad mainstream market that PS4 in particular seemed to successfully tap into. Maybe e.g. Sony should've offered a PS4 Pro launching at $600 simultaneously with the $400 PS4 back in 2013? Maybe that's the way to go with the PS5?

As you point out, more and more PC gamers are gradually "coming back" to buying consoles (my friends on all platforms talk about Spider-Man), often as a secondary platform now that great exclusives and stronger hardware (PS4 Pro and XB1X) have arrived.

 

In the end, it's difficult to know what (and if) Sony and Microsoft could've done differently this gen in order to better tap into this "easier market". Maybe they have a bunch of market analyzes lying around showing that cheap (and weaker) consoles is the way to go and that premium and expensive consoles launching simultaneously are a disadvantage? No matter what, they must try to secure a stronger exclusive library much earlier going forward.

Yeah, even with hindsight it's hard to know what would have been the most optimal approach, and there are some things that would have quite fairly seemed very risky at the time. As much as i'm focusing on what I think went wrong here (in the context of taking full advantage of the opportunities available to them), I do think Sony and MS have overall still done a good job in NA (barring the obvious lol). They had a lot of difficult choices to make, and not only have a lot of those decisions paid off, but they've also learnt a lot from what didn't. I'm excited to see where the console market goes next.

It'll be interesting to see if either of them opt for base and premium models at launch next-gen. I'd personally love it, but as far as the market at large is concerned it's hard to know. The safer move would be to just have a base model, but ensure it launches with software compelling enough to still drag some PC gamers though the door (and some more casual gamers too if possible). I guess we'll find out soon! If Sony release a premium model I hope it's 599 US dollars, just so we can go full circle :D

That would be beautiful.