Global Hardware 01 September 2018

[The_Liquid_Laser]

chakkra said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:
I am actually impressed the XB1 continues to do so well in NA. I mean, what are they really doing? If you just compare PS4 and XB1 game libraries, it would seem the PS4 is just far better, having many more exclusives. And yet in North America XB1 continues to be competitive with PS4. In fact, PS4 is down so far compared to last year XB1 is up compared to last year. Has the XB1 released any significant any significant exclusives in 2018? Is it Sea of Thieves? Is that why more people want an XB1 this year? I doubt it.

From what I can tell, the things that might actually help XB1 are
1) the effort to expand backwards compatibility and/or
2) the popularity of battle royale games like PUBG and Fortnite.

Hard to tell which is the bigger factor at this point.

If I were to make a guess I would say it is a combination of:

A) X1X

B) Games Pass (I mean, for the price of ONE game on the competition camp, you have access here to 100 games during 6 months)

C) Backwards compatibility (The fact that they have put the effort to enhance many of those games virtually making them re-masters for free)

In fact, what I find weird is that the rest of the world has not been affected one bit by any of this.

I forgot about Games Pass.  That is another likely cause.  (And as I said I think backwards compatibility efforts are helping them.)

X1X is probably giving a small boost, but I don't think it is the biggest factor.  I mean, Sony has the PS4 Pro and it is still down YoY so far, while XB1 is up YoY.  Usually game library is the most important thing, which clearly PS4 has in its favor.  But backwards compatibility effectively does increase the game library, and Games Pass makes the library a lot more accessible.  Most likely it is one of those (or both) that is giving the XB1 the biggest boost.