Support NeoGAF

[spookyfish]

When they went all in on Kinect, is my guess.

 

[ShadowkillXNA]

They lost before it even began

Me when I saw this video the first time.

 

[photogaz]

Don Mattrick, so long before!

 

[photogaz]

Me when I saw this video the first time.

Yup, me too. God I miss this Sony!

 

[Lord Malachite]

I think it is interesting that it doesn't get talked about enough how scared Xbox was of the PS3 until Sony actually revealed it and its critically high (for the time) price point. The fear and scrambling to beat Sony to the market by a year to get out way ahead of it.--their mad rush caused them to cut corners and introduce fatal flaws into the 360's design that all came home to roost at the worst possible time for Xbox.; when Sony was at their weakest and in grave danger of being relegated to third place indefinitely.

Xbox being forced to turn all of its attention and resources to the RROD fiasco at that critical juncture gave Sony all the opportunity it needed to pick itself up and push Xbox onto their back foot. They never regained the advantage they lost.

 

[Radical_3d]

Some solid points were made, I hate to say.

No telling if the next gen Xbox can be a return to form for Microsoft, but I always wish them the best.

This is so depressing and angering… should the Series had a 360 year or two of awesome games and not the Series S and not the stupid GP this could have been so different. Sony dropped the ball hard this generation and it was a golden opportunity but I guess that corpos are idiots everywhere.

 

[coffinbirth]

They need to manufacture and supply more systems.

Thats about it.

supply=/=demand

 

[PlayStaytion]

The root cause is that Xbox management has always lacked a clear vision.

You can see this from the late 360 era onwards, when it was clear the market was shifting away from the things they had built their successes on earlier in the gen and yet they did nothing to adjust. They assumed annual Halo, Gears and Forza were always going to be enough to support their core, and the route to the broader market was via motion controlled family games and plastic-instrument based music titles.

When all these things fell off... they stubbornly stuck with this approach in terms of content as they were at that stage balls-deep into their masterplan to make the Xbox One this monetizable universal media bulwark. Hence the whole TV TV TV push.

Unfortunately for them, this failed on every level as a resurgent Sony went on a charm offensive to court back core gamers they had lost in the PS3 era.

Everything that's happened since has been a consequence of that, mainly because MS have never really cared about or understood gaming, they just looked upon it jealously as another revenue stream that could be used as a tentpole around which to build a comprehensive consumer entertainment offer.

The methods and approach have changed over the years, but that fundamental flawed intent has been a constant. Its all just been a means to a larger end, which is why they've pivoted so hard and often and yet very little has actually changed.

Numbers don't lie, PC gaming footprint are way bigger, the average consumer are no longer the target audience. Modern businesses success rely on data accuracy.

 

[Gryllis]

For this generation specifically - the business podcast.

It was a weird choice of medium to try and present a strong future for Xbox. But it just clearly conveyed they're done selling Xbox consoles as we know them, and consumers reacted accordingly.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Maybe. The Japanese seem to just prefer Japanese companies. I'm not sure anything could be done there.

Europe theoretically should be a competitive space. Microsoft probably just didn't do enough advertising.

Sony has always advertised at soccer stadiums in Europe and I think people just associate the Fifa games with Playstation.

I have never seen an Xbox logo at any European footie match, closest I've seen is that they used to sponsor Seattle in MLS

PlayStation's brand has been all over European football since 1995 sponsoring the Champions League, Euros and various Premier League stadiums

Last week Liverpool vs Real Madrid had an animated AstroBot popping up on the electric hoardings

Even Sega's Arsenal sponsorship wasn't safe from it…

Meanwhile Xbox does this, no wonder most of the world was turned off by the Xbone reveal…

 

[thismeinteil]

It started at the tail end of the 360 era. They started focusing way more on Kinect and pumping out games for it than games for their core audience. It just followed them on through with the poor XBO design where they skimped on specs to be able to spend that money on Kinect 2.0 and thought cable was going to be the future still. Very short sighted. They realized they fucked up and tried pushing supped up PCs and game builds designed for said PCs as actual XBO HW and what the final games would look like.

Then, they thought Day 1 on PC would be a good thing, but just killed their HW sales. Then GamePass made it worse. They then bought two huge publishers, only to realize to make any money on the purchase they needed to go 3rd party. Of course, they couldn't even handle that right and have been muddying the waters with their approach, instead of just ripping off the band-aid and just going all in like they will do soon.

 

[Zacfoldor]

We have seen with steam on PC that an audience will actively fight to keep their games on a singular platform.

Thus initial creation of digital libraries was a key time for future platform selection.

Sony, Valve, and Nintendo were able to sell a considerable amount of software during this time creating an ostensibly perpetual back catalogue of games for every gamer that we lovingly call our "backlog."

The creation and locations of these backlogs en masse grew on rival platforms while the Xbox backlog building was eventually stifled by bad marketing. Gamepass was the strategy to move past this issue along with acquisitions for exclusive games but it was never good enough and now plans have changed at Xbox and no more Mr. Nice guy. Overnight, they went from "Please rent our stuff for 1 dollar a month to get access to everything" to "no lowball offers, I know what I got."

 

[RetroGamingUK]

We have seen with steam on PC that an audience will actively fight to keep their games on a singular platform.

Thus initial creation of digital libraries was a key time for future platform selection.

Sony, Valve, and Nintendo were able to sell a considerable amount of software during this time creating an ostensibly perpetual back catalogue of games for every gamer that we lovingly call our "backlog."

The creation and locations of these backlogs en masse grew on rival platforms while the Xbox backlog building was eventually stifled by bad marketing. Gamepass was the strategy to move past this issue along with acquisitions for exclusive games but it was never good enough and now plans have changed at Xbox and no more Mr. Nice guy. Overnight, they went from "Please rent our stuff for 1 dollar a month to get access to everything" to "no lowball offers, I know what I got."

Gamepass was the worst thing they could do in terms of digital lock-in.

After the 50% price hike people left in droves and didn't have digital libraries that they owned to keep them with Xbox.

Phil Spencer bemoaned losing the digital library generation while conversely making their situation worse.