By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Doctor_MG on 22 April 2022
Edit Thread
Pemalite said:

MS Botched the Xbox hard because they also failed to "understand the market direction" and thought it was going always-online, TV/Streaming with a poor name that failed to communicate that it was a successor. - So it's the same as the WiiU in that regard.

As for the PS3, we need to keep context here...
Sony was on top with the PS2, so that arrogance flowed into the Playstation 3's design and release, hence statements like... "Our goal for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves, 'I will work more hours to buy one".
The high price, inefficient and difficult hardware.. And most multiplats being inferior to the competition really put a dampener on Sony at the start of that Gen.

The difference of it all is, Microsoft has never been on top in the console space... But we still ended up with the launch Xbox One... I could only imagine what they would have been like if they had 80% of the market locked up like Sony did.

In saying that... And I have been saying it for years... I want all three console manufacturers to have absolutely identical marketshare for competitive reasons... It benefits us, the consumer most of all with more innovation, more investment, lower prices.

The 7th gen was one such generation... Sony did a massive turnaround on the PS3 and made it a worthy console, the Wii was great fun, the Xbox 360 had some real banging games.
End result was Xbox: 84 million, PS3: 87.4 million, Wii: 101.63 million... And regardless of what console you got, you were going to have a blast.


Bold 1: Misunderstanding the direction of the market to offscreen devices (which IS where the market was at the time if you look at all the "second screen experiences during E3 2012) is NOT comparable to attempting to control the entire ecosystem via an always online system functionality to prevent used game purchases and modular hardware. One is a misunderstanding, the other is anticonsumer. 

Bold 2: This is literally the equivalent of "We have a device for you, buy a 360". The difference is, the PS3 offered complete and total backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 on a hardware level, a Blu Ray drive that was actually relatively cheap in comparison to what you had on the market at the time, and it wasn't even drastically more than it's competition (20GB was 499.99, 20GB Xbox 360 was 399.99). Also, at the time, 360 did not offer HD DVD functionality without an add on (or Blu Ray of course), did not offer WiFi without an add on,  and did not have an HDMI input. Unlike the Xbox One to the PS4, what the PS3 was offering (A PS1, PS2, PS3, Blu Ray player, integrated Wifi, HDMI) was pretty good. The increase in price was worth it, despite being a lot for the time. The comment was a bad one for publicity purposes, absolutely. 

Bold 3: Absolutely agree with this as a concept. However, sometimes a manufacturer just deserves to have lower marketshare. For example, in no universe do I think the Xbox One deserved to have as much marketshare as the PS4. I do think that the original Xbox and Gamecube should have had much more marketshare than they were given, however.