Global Hardware 1 June 2019

[EricHiggin]

COKTOE said:

RolStoppable said:

Microsoft would have been better off by skipping the Xbox One X and launching a successor this year or even late last year. While the graphical prowess would have been limited due to cross-gen, a console that is next gen draws a lot more attention than a mid-gen upgrade. The PS5 would then have been more powerful without a doubt due to launching later, but that's something Microsoft could have countered with a mid-gen upgrade for their Xbox 4 in 2022 to have the marketing message on their side again and by the time Sony brought their mid-gen upgrade, the difference wouldn't be as important anymore as it was at the beginning.

What Microsoft actually did was drag out a generation that they had clearly lost, so now their console business is in a very rough time for a couple of years. I suppose they bought into their own PR of "XB1 is outpacing 360 launch-aligned", so they turned a blind eye to proper sales analyses which would have revealed that the XB1 has 0 chance to keep up with the 360 in the long run.

Microsoft was smarter in the fast transition from the original Xbox to the 360 where the headstart clearly paid off. Of course the lesson to learn from the 360 is proper engineering of the console because it creates a bad reputation when the failure rate is so high, but the general idea of a headstart is sound despite not being a surefire ticket to increased success.

That's an interesting thought. Things couldn't realistically get much worse for Xbox, so you may be right.

The downside to that scenario is that the X-Box would have had to, especially if it dropped in 2019, ride out the rest of the gen with a wildly inferior platform to the PS4-Pro, and they were already fairing poorly in direct comparisons to the original PS4. It's possible sales, and the brand may have suffered even more in skipping the X.

A 2018 or 2019 'XB2' would have been extremely tough to get a decent SSD in there in terms of speed and size, along with PCIe 4.0 or whatever recent/future tech they're using to achieve these loading speeds they are promising. Not to mention it would also almost certainly lack ray tracing. You can imagine PS would probably try to move up their schedule a bit in a 2018 scenario, but they could wait a year if it was launched in 2019 instead. PS having a bigger, faster storage solution, PCIe 4.0, and ray tracing, would be a marketing nuke against MS. The cost for XB to try and come close to the tech and specs PS5 would have, would cost way more than $500 if launched by now or soon. It could have led to another Dreamcast scenario.

Last edited by EricHiggin - on 20 June 2019