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Cerebralbore101 on 12 March 2020
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Azzanation said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

It's true that consoles cost money to make and research. My estimate was an extreme lowball though. There's easily enough wiggle room in those numbers to make R&D costs and production costs disappear. 

Competition increasing? From what? Streaming? Stadia and the like are the 3D0 and Jaguar of the 2020's. 

Yes, less console sales hurts shareholders. 

As far as mainline home consoles go Nintendo has a pretty good track record for messing up. N64, Gamecube, and Wii U were all failures. NES, SNES, and Wii were successes. It's no surprise that a company that had two console sales failures (N64 and GC), followed by a huge hit (Wii), would drop back to low sales a gen later. So I wouldn't attribute that to luck. 

Xbox did indeed slip up, but Sony definitely handled this gen well. They made all the right decisions. Sony's excellent studios, good gameplay focused hardware, and consumer friendly stance took the market just as much as Xbox gave it away. 

I don't think Xbox will have a resurgence at all. They face a Sony that is coming off a PS4 high note, and horrible sales of the XB1 this late in the gen. If it does though, that would be a result of Sony throwing all their exclusives onto other platforms, and basically giving up on the strength of their brand. Even then though, I don't see Xbox ever passing 65 million lifetime sales ever again. 

Sony is basically Nintendo, but with full blown 3rd party support. They've raised their 1st party content up to Nintendo's level, while still getting pretty much every 3rd party AAA game. And remember there's way more money to be lost by abandoning their brand, than there is from a few extra PC sales. 

What Sony really needs to do is focus on improving the PS brand, while making PSNow a serious competitor to gamepass. That way when streaming eventually takes over, in ten years, they can dominate the streaming market as much as they dominated the console market. Instead, they seem hellbent on pulling a MS, and becoming a 3rd party developer that just happens to have a console on the side. 

The PS2 is considered the best selling console in history yet the 360 came out and halved Sonys Userbase.

The Wii was Nintendos best selling home console followed by there weakest selling in the WiiU.

Just because the PS4 sold so well doesnt mean its an autosuccess for the PS5. Those two points above prove my point.

Xbox is on the surge upwards, your lack of respect for the PS5s competitor is exactly what happen when the PS3 launched against the 360.

The console market is only so big, gamers will have more choices not less. The PS4 did not kill off its competition, it only created it.

src said:

Completely wrong. Having exclusives is the reason PS1/2 was dominating, is the reason the PS3 was able to gain traction and why the PS4 remains dominant. 

Exclusives -> larger userbase -> larger platform software sales -> larger sub counts -> more money to invest into exclusives and such

Larger Userbase increases by increasing your audience not reducing it.

WiiU, Gamecube, N64, Dreamcast all had exclusives, what happened there?

The 360 halved Sony's userbase?

https://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/

157 million divided by two does not equal 87 million.

Let's not forget several facts regarding PS2. 

1. It had amazing legs. Just look at these post 2006 shipment numbers! https://web.archive.org/web/20120609161654/scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps2_e.html

2. The consoles it competed against were all from either companies new to the console business (Microsoft), or trying to recover from a serious last gen decline (Sega/Nintendo).

3. Being a cheap DVD player helped drive sales. The DVD format was a revolutionary improvement over VHS. Nearly everybody wanted a DVD player, and PS2 was a DVD player that could also play games. It cost the same or less as other DVD players of the early 2000s. 

The writing was on the wall for the Wii U's failure. The two consoles before the Wii sold 32 Million, and 22 Million. Sony on the other hand handily won three generations, and effectively tied for 2nd place vs a 360 with a 50% failure rate on it's initial model. https://consumerist.com/2009/08/17/xbox-360-failure-rate-is-542-percent-game-informer-finds/

So up until 2009 or whenever the slim came out there was a massive failure rate, causing people to buy 2nd, 3rd, and 4th 360's. I went through three of the things, and didn't even bother getting a PS3 until 2008!

We could easily attribute 10 million in 360 sales to RROD. That puts the adjusted count at 87 million PS3's vs 75 Million 360's. 

Now let's remember that 360 had a full year's launch ahead of PS3. So adjust another 4-5 million downward. 

Xbox is on the surge upwards, your lack of respect for the PS5s competitor is exactly what happen when the PS3 launched against the 360.

XB1 sales have been in the 40,000 to 50,000 range in weekly sales for the past 8-10 months. That's not a surge upwards. That's a precipitous decline. Perhaps you meant surge upwards in some hazy, non-objective, marketing terms? In that case, the color black is more appealing to me personally, than the color green, therefore Xbox Series X will clearly lose the battle, based solely on my personal non-objective preferences. Good argument isn't it? (Hint: It's not.)

Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - on 12 March 2020