3rd Party Exclusives are hurting the industry

[Mnementh]

Jumpin said:

Mnementh said:

Actually that is wrong: Playstation is imitating Xbox, not the other way around. They are just far more successful with it.

Think about it: the PS5 is far more similar in design to the original Xbox and 360, than to PS1 and PS2. Being online, patches, DLC, online multiplayer instead of couch multiplayer, harddrives for patches, DLC and digital games, achievement system and so on. Even in genres PS has completely left the dominating genres of the PS1/2-era and switched to shooters, action adventures, action RPGs and racers (the last one were a thing always on anything). But that was the lineup the original Xbox had: Gears, Halo, Morrowind, KOTOR, Riddick and so on. The lineup of the original Xbox and the contemporary PS2 were quite differently. But while Xbox mainly kept this lineup, PS got pretty close and ditched series that were once their main thing. They sold off Crash and Spyro as they shifted their focus.

So I would argue in this ony is cloning MS. They just have the stronger brand, the more loyal fans (as this is often argued with Nintendo: look at WiiU to know the amount of loyal Nintendo fans and look at PS3 to know the amount of loyal PS fans) and better connections to 3rd-parties (as they were the saviour of 3rd-parties that wanted to escape Nintendos practices in the NES/SNES-days).

If you ask me what PS actually innovated I would be hardpressed. They are of the big three the most invested in VR, although they hardly can be said to have invented it. Other than that I am not actually sure they brought anything interesting into the console area. They excel though at refining and standardizing it.

Apart from internal storage, nothing you mentioned is hardware related and therefore, not what I’m talking about—as a note, none of those software conventions/features were invented or popularized by Xbox, either. And saying Sony copied hard drives from Xbox is silly; Sony already had devices for years with internal hard drives years before Xbox (such as the Vaio line). In fact, because it’s so often a step in the evolution of electronic devices dating back to the 1950s. This includes, cameras, TVs, music players, mobile phones, and numerous other electronic devices; stuff Sony and its subsidiaries were putting internal storage into by the early 2000s.

You can say Sony copied Sega and Nintendo for various elements of their design invented or popularized by those companies: shoulder buttons, analog sticks, D-pads, handheld consoles, and such; but the PlayStation was a distinct package. Meanwhile, the Xbox line is very much a line of PlayStation cloneboxes—right down to the controller which imitates the dual shock controller (a controller you’re apparently unfamiliar with). You could argue that Sony designed their original console to take market share from Nintendo and Sega, and even stretching back to Commodore and Atari, but their design was instrumental in carving out a significant portion (most of it) themselves - not Xbox. The PlayStation package (including dual shock) and its iterative approach, are distinctly Sony’s conventions to hardware used to carve out their marketplace. Microsoft isn’t trying to carve out their own marketplace like Sony and Nintendo did - rather, they imitate hardware that already exists in their attempts to cut into those existing marketplaces.

If Microsoft came up with original console hardware, they’d have a shot at being successful in the industry—but they have that corporate cowardice (since at least the 1990s) of only green lighting things targeting audiences that have already been successfully targeted. That’s why it might be impossible for them to carve out their own space without some serious cultural changes in their company.

So then tell me: why does PS5 look more like an Xbox than a PS2? And tell me please, in which way PS brought anything new to gaming, that wasn't copied from anything else. Also online is part of the hardware and hardware and software act as a unity on consoles.