Never actually owned a console myself — been a PC + Steam guy forever — so I'm kind of an outsider looking in on this whole "RIP Xbox" talk. From what I can tell though, I honestly don't get what objectfully PS5 supposedly has that Xbox doesn't. Hardware-wise they're nearly identical, accessories are basically the same, and both rely heavily on third-party games (there was a topic few weeks ago with the top played games on PlayStation in the last 20 years), . The only real difference seems to be Sony locking down more exclusives and having a stronger brand image.
Yeah, Sony's first-party lineup leans into those big AAA cinematic experiences, while Xbox tends to go for more gameplay-driven, AA-style titles — but let's be real, neither approach is the magic differentiator people claim it is. You wait three, four, sometimes five years for any of these blockbusters to actually drop. In the meantime, everyone's just playing the same multiplatform stuff anyway.
It's funny, because from a purely objective standpoint, Xbox feels like it's done a lot right for the casuals — Game Pass, cross-platform support, backward compatibility — but none of that seems to matter in the console popularity contest. It's like they "lost" more in perception than in actual product.