Azzanation said:
Exclusives are anti-consumer, it means you have to pay more to play more games, why do consumers want that? Oh that's right, because they are consumers not customers, consumers eat up anything companies tell them while customers shop around.
360 RROD was covered by warranty and MS spent $1.5b to fix the issue, even with spending $1.5b the 360 still lost less money than the PS3. My point is with healthy competition, the userbase divides, Sony went from 150m customers to 80m, Xbox went from 30m customers to 80m and Nintendo went from 20m customers to 100m customers. This gen the competition wasn't healthy until the S and Switch released however that was midway through the generation. The surge of Xbox is being missed read for some odd reason. I am not referring to this generation I am referring to the Xbox brand and the decision making and next gen planning. Xbox is going to be bigger next gen. As others have mentioned, its what MS is building upon for next gen. If you think Sony is just going to walk out the gate with PS2 or PS4 numbers expecting no competition from Xbox or Nintendo than you need to take the glasses for a min and look around you. Next gen is looking more like Gen 7 if the competition remains heavily competitive with no slip ups. Also half of 157m is 78m which is very close to 87m. Which rounds out to be half. The 360 also sold 1b software on a platform that sold less than 90m consoles, its the only console to achieve that milestone so thats a feat in itself and guess what makes more money.. suprise, the software, the PS3 sold less software overall to the 360 aswell. At the End of the day, the more competition can lead to a more level playing field like we saw last gen. In this case, if all 3 brands have great consoles at launch than expect tight sales between the 3. |
MS spending money to fix the problem doesn't change the fact that many people were buying multiple 360's due to the RROD issue.
My point is with healthy competition, the userbase divides, Sony went from 150m customers to 80m, Xbox went from 30m customers to 80m and Nintendo went from 20m customers to 100m customers. This gen the competition wasn't healthy until the S and Switch released however that was midway through the generation.
You still don't see the forest for the trees. Roughly 30 million of the sales loss from PS2 to PS3 had nothing to do with competition. It had to do with Blu-Ray not being as revolutionary as DVD, with many countries not getting an affordable PS2 price until 2004-2007, and with the following gen being disappointing early on (which led to people still buying and sticking with the PS2 until 2008). https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/05/ps2_most_played_2008_nielson_yearly_roundup/
10-20 million of the 360's sales had nothing to do with competition either. It had to do with RROD.
And again with Wii. Nintendo didn't reach that 100 million number by stealing (A.K.A. Competition) gamers from Sony, or MS. They made it by getting Grandmas and Soccer Moms temporarily into gaming. As well as getting many people to buy Wii as a cheap 2nd system.
If we take the historical context into account, the difference that competition made would be Xbox 360 gaining 40 million users, PS3 losing 30 million users, and Nintendo gaining 30 million users over GameCube.
You remind me of rural Texans thinking they can secede from the union with just a citizen's militia. They'll say that the 13 colonies rebelled against the British Superpower and won, with just a simple militia, therefore Texas can rebel against the USA and win.
But just like you they ignore the historical context. Britain was thousands of miles away, and fighting a war with another superpower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-French_War_(1778%E2%80%931783) Colonial times were unique in that the citizenry had weapons on par with the military of the time. Today, civilians do not have military grade weapons.
Switch is definitely healthy competition, but the S? XB1 weekly sales numbers are still half to a quarter of PS4 weekly sales numbers. That's not healthy competition. Also remember that Switch has massive crossover appeal. Nintendo is rarely stealing sales from PS4 or XB1, but rather getting people to buy a Switch as a 2nd system.
Anyway, my point here is that yes competition can even out sales, but it is not the be-all end-all of sales. There are other factors that come into play, and those need to be accounted for in order to see the bigger picture.
P.S. I agree that 360 did indeed do more software sales. But it's console royalty fees that ultimately make more money for a console, not individual software sales. MS didn't have better profit margins than Sony because they were making a boatload of money directly from sales of Halo 3's, and GoW's. They had a better profit margin because every 3rd party dev had to pay a $10-$15 console royalty fee per game sold. And having games like Halo, GoW, Fable, Viva Pinata, Crackdown, etc indirectly helped them with that goal, by moving more console units, which lead to more 3rd party sales, hence more $10-$15 royalty fees racked up.
I am referring to the Xbox brand and the decision making and next gen planning.
Like I said, hazy, non-objective, marketing terms.
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