Sinfulgore
Member
Technically there are "places" obviously. You can take the total hardware sales of PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch consoles and list that number from highest to lowest. My point was that this metric is meaningless and only fanboys care about it, which sometimes include Microsoft and Sony employees.If you listened clearly to how Phil spoke on this, you’ll note he referred to “places” and xbox not being first, and “winning” or not.
He also said that even an 11/10 Starfield wouldn’t lead to a shift of console ownership and people “selling their PS5s”.
This latter point is to me exactly the problem with MS and Xbox. Xbox set the conditions for a win - console dominance - and have failed on their own terms.
There is no need for anyone to sell anything - any company interested in making money from gaming just has to get the content out there, and MS has more ways of doing that today than they’ve ever had.
Yet Phil referred to people selling their PS5s. That was his reference to “winning”. Not people buying an xbox or even just buying an MGS game - he specifically said selling their PS5.
If MS had set up xbox as a division interested in peaceful coexistence with the rest of the gaming marketplace, they’d be in a uniquely powerful position today - they’d be set to host all the major game content on their cloud service going forward. They could and should be making deals with Sony, Nintendo and the major 3P publishers to host all that content and take a slice of their action.
Instead, they’re trying to put other first parties out of business while coercing customers to their services through acquisition. That’s what winning means for xbox - dominance. And that’s why their most vocal cheerleaders are obsessed with console warring.
Maybe in the past but current Xbox doesn't care about console dominance, they wouldn't release their first-party games day and date on PC if they did. Current Xbox is all about profits and you can make way more money on subscriptions like game pass than selling new hardware every 5-7 years. Microsoft is clearly working on building a game pass library, with all these acquisitions, so when Xcloud is ready to release to the public it will have every game a casual gamer would want to play. Sony and Nintendo would never make deals with Microsoft to host their content and there is nothing Microsoft could do to put Sony or Nintendo out of business. We finally live in a time where Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are three unique platforms and not just three flavors of the same thing. It actually makes sense for someone to have a switch lite for offline portable gaming/access to Nintendo's games, a Playstation 5 as your main console, and be a member of Gamepass Ultimate. Gone are the days when you to have pick a side yet for some reason the console war mentality still exists.
Being #1 and making as many sales as possible are two entirely different things. Being #1 is a meaningless metric, especially in this context where we are talking about products at different price levels, the cheapest Switch is half the cost of the cheapest PS5 for example. All major companies care about is profits because it's not a fair comparison to compare the sales of two entirely different products like a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch.
Most, if not virtually all, major companies care about being #1 or at the very least making as many sales as they possibly can.
And for the rare few that don’t for some bizarre reason, you can be rest assured the shareholders do.
Regardless, it’s a stupid thing for a major representative of a company to say out loud. I never heard of the CEO of Dairy Queen admitting they‘ll never reach the sales of McDonald’s or Burger King. Bad PR is, well, BAD.
I do agree that it's not the kind of thing a company should say in public but I would have assumed what he said was common sense. PlayStation is a much bigger brand than Xbox worldwide and with Xbox being split into two platforms(PC & Console), the Xbox will never have the market share of Playstation or Nintendo just like MacOS will never reach the market share of Windows.