I'm aware of all of that. I'm simply saying specs played a much lesser role in what happened last gen. "Do everything perfect" doesn't mean they had to have a console that was better or equal to the PS4. They just needed software that even the playing field and that's where they fell short. The rise of PSN was the icing on the cake and all other factors were after the fact.

PS4 and Xbox share a very similar library. As a 360 owner I immediately said i'm buying a PS4  after seeing the specs compared to xbone. The gaming community were  ecstatic about ps4 specs and ram, while  xbox was a laughing stock. I think it was a Huge reason and if specs were reversed i have no doubt that xbone would have put a much better fight and probably sold 80 million last gen.

They would have sold a bit more with better specs, but I doubt 80 million. Again, specs don't sell systems for long periods. The GameCube was many times more powerful than the PS2, for example, but in the end, its software was lacking and that is why they lost so bad.

It's unshakable. Software is the driver of longevity, not hardware specs. They simply play an early role in new adoption, which helps, yes, but Sony didn't sell 117 million PS4's mainly because it had a 50% more powerful graphics card.

Sony differently has the better exclusives but for the most part the libraries  are similar.  Sony big  exclusives sellers also came out  4 years after ps4 release and it was already blowing away xbox by that time. 

Well seems like what I remember was a bit off, 50% is quite a bit more, as well as it having slower memory really skipped my mind.

But I remember those comparisions back in the day, and the most notable differences early on was the bump in resolution PS4 games got, even as they were more detailed as well.

Probably mid-gen devs just stopped caring that much as the PS4 was really the place to focus your base at and if you went with a Xbox One you should really go for the Xbox One X instead.

The cross gen titles are really rough on base XBO tho, every one of those Digital Foundry videos I saw would just straight up recommend you simply don't play it on the base XBO unless it was your only option.

I don’t think Xbone having less power was the main reason as why it crashed against the PS4, even so, 58m units is not a small number.

The brand is just simply smaller than PS and on top of that it launched $100 more than the PS4.

The XBO was really, really far behind in game quality on exclusives compared to the PS4.

But they actually climbed back up with their services instead of games, people had WAY better expectations for the Xbox Series than they had for the Xbox One even when the games were still not there.

PS3 did climb back up mostly on great games tho, indeed, which was proven during the PS4 gen, first party titles sales jumped exponentially because of how good those games were.

I agree that using definitives for scenarios that didn't happen isn't the best as that will stay forever not able to be proven, but the demand was really sky high, Sony was not being able to keep any stock they had and scalpers convicing people to pay double on an already expensive product for longer than a year is quite a bit telling.

People wanted it, maybe the hype would have died fast if everyone was able to do get one (which is unlikely, IMO), but the big demand certainly was there, people where craving for more units to ship.

I'd rather be hearing about Series X/S vs PS5 comments since that's far more relevant to today. Like, how has there been seemingly no improvement despite there being much more parity between Series X and PS5 than the generation prior and also having a more budget friendly option in the Series S? And then there's also putting all their first party titles on Game Pass on day one along with several good to great third party releases? Like, how has there not been any change? It baffles me.

Historically, just making a good product hasn’t been enough to take away marketshare, the competition has to make poor decisions.

PS1 was able to succeed Genesis as the “cool and edgy” console because Sega was losing customer confidence by having so many products on the market (Genesis, Game Gear, Nomad, CD, 32x, Pico) then botching Saturn by making it difficult to develop for and having the weird early launch that pissed off developers and retailers. Then Nintendo lost support of the major Japanese 3rd parties by going with cartridges.

With 360, Microsoft was able to gain a bunch of marketshare from Sony mostly due to Blu-Ray causing PS3 to cost $600 (at a huge loss) and being more difficult to develop for, making many multiplats inferior despite being more powerful 360.

Sony was able to claw back a bunch of that marketshare because Microsoft had the terrible idea to make Kinect mandatory (motion gaming was on the decline at this time and it caused XBO to be $100 more than PS4) and the whole DRM fiasco.

Without those major mistakes in each generation than you likely wouldn’t have seen PS1 dominate the market, 360 take half of the PS2 audience or PS4 retake a large part of that audience. Sony didn’t make any major mistakes with PS5 for Microsoft to capitalize on and steal marketshare so it’s essentially a continuation of the previous generation.

Edit: The possible exception is Sega Genesis, I don’t think Nintendo made any major mistakes with SNES. Sega had a two year head start, a really good marketing campaign and launched a killer app months before SNES launched. However, Nintendo didn’t do themselves any favors by censoring Mortal Kombat (kinda played into Sega’s marketing of Nintendo being for kids). Nintendo still comfortably won the generation globally though.