It's clear that the dedicated home console war is over for this gen, with PS5 having crushed the Xbox Series.

Do you think there was ever a chance that Xbox Series could have won the sales war, or by the time the current gen began were they just in an unwinnable position and fucked no matter what?

Not unwinnable, but they would have to have a more clear vision for their hardware and path forward.

they could have won if they came out with good games and not let them go on other platforms. pretty simple concept. they executed that strategy well on the 360 and barely lost, if they did that well this time around they'd have made it much more competitive.

also i think it would have benefitted them to change their ui and differentiate it more from the xbox one.

Yes Xbox probably could have "won" this gen but that would have required a clearer focus on actually releasing games in a timely manner at the start of the Gen. When they actually stated to release games at a reasonable pace they also announced that they were going multiplatform.

No. There was no way for them to win, but still, I never imagined that they would simply hand over a big portion of their market share.

And I really dont think they will ever recover that portion back.

Yes, historically you need the competition to fuck up in order to take a large portion of their market share.

PS1 wouldn’t have become so dominant if Sega wasn’t busy making every mistake imaginable & Nintendo went with CDs.

360 wouldn’t have taken half of the PS2 market if Sony didn’t get arrogant and release a $600 console in 2006.

PS4 wouldn’t have stolen back a bunch of that market if Microsoft didn’t go all in on Kinect/DRM with Xbox One.

Basically PS5/Series is a repeat of PS4/XBO because Sony didn’t make any notable mistakes for Microsoft to capitalize on.

Definitely, they haven't really made any mistakes,and have pursed the path of greatest profitability. The problem is that the previous generations have made them too weak to fight back hard, and so they have lost.

Unwinnable (unless they made every game including COD a true Xbox exclusive even against PC). But it could have been a much closer gen. A 40:60~ split was achievable seeing as how Sony too kind of messed up with the PS5.

Once you switch from one brand to another, it's unlikely that you will return to the previous. The Bethesda purchase rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and than they followed it up with Activision. Anyone that didn't like the Xbox was furious with them at this point, and wouldn't purchase it out of principal.

No. You would need to go at least as far back as 2014 and have competent leadership to build up years of trust with gamers and other partners. Xbox never had IPs as strong as the other 2. What Matrick and Spencer did damaged the brand. They could have recovered from Matrick. Sony recovered from the first 2 awful years of PS3. Matrick's bullshit plus 6 years of Spencer's indepitude put Series X in a deep hole before it was even announced. All Sony had to do was not royally fuck up in the announcement of the PS5. They didn't. Series X didn't either, but long droughts. Bad leadership. Focusing on buying everything over forming studios and making strong new IPs. Even tho Sony has been pretty shit post PS5 launch overall. Xbox is up there with 90s Atari levels of shit leadership. 90s SEGA looks better. All they lacked was the MS warchest.