Puts things into perspective about Bethesda doing a blog post and press release on their own site before the Series X launched with a list of games they were going to have an upgrade patch for, but did no such thing for the Pro.
They've always worked more closely with MSFT.
Yeah, and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. Square-Enix for example, work more closely with Sony and that's been the case since the late '90s, but it makes sense due to the business partnerships they've had which have been mutually beneficial for both parties.
It'd only be a problem if these companies are actively making other versions of those games worst out of "forced parity" like the leaked RE Village contract showed, but people also completely misread that contract and didn't understand what parity in that context actually meant (Hoegg's Law did a great breakdown on how people were misinterpreting terms and clauses in that contract and making it look anti-consumer/anti-competitive when it actually wasn't).
Saleswise I think they'll do much much better than XBOne but nowhere near PS5. I hope people give them a chance though.
Last gen the sales ratio was effectively 2:1 in favor of PS4. Currently the sales ratio with the new-gen is roughly
1.64:1 in favor of Sony. So technically speaking
there's already a reduction in that ratio but it can be debated if that reduction is due to gains by Xbox or lack of supply by Sony acting as the driving factor in that ratio reduction we currently see, although it should be noted that Microsoft are also short on supply for their demand (they do feel that they'll be able to fix their supply issues by early Summer though whereas Sony feels theirs will persist for the rest of the year).
The real question is will that ratio hold, or will it shrink even further (in Microsoft's favor), go back to 2:1 or increase even further (in Sony's favor)? Personally, I think with things the way they are now and known software plans between the two, plus certain supply constraints,
that ratio will shrink in Microsoft's favor for the short-term (thanks to improved supply), maybe something like
1.55:1 or 1.5:1. That will especially hold true if Sony can't also improve their supply situation for the second half of the year.
If Sony are able to do that, though, then it'll come down to when and if some of the other games like Horizon and GoW ship this year. If so, and by some chance
Halo Infinite doesn't hit well and Starfield doesn't release, then I think the ratio gets back closer to the
2:1 in Sony's favor. If Horizon and/or Ragnarok don't come out this year and Halo/Starfield both come out and are great,
Microsoft can probably shrink that ratio to
1.25:1 (Sony's still going to have foreign market advantages).
If Sony can't deliver Horizon/Ragnarok this year but Halo and/or Starfield are mediocre, then the sales ratio'll probably hover around
1:5:1 - 1:6:1 in favor of Sony.
All of that speculation is literally only for this year, mind. It's too difficult to predict how the rest of the generation goes but assuming Microsoft and Sony continue at their current paces and Microsoft's 1st-party arrives strongly, and they are able to keep pushing for some big 3P deals of new releases into GamePass...I think that does start to heavily close the longer-term sales gap between the two brands this gen, but
only if Sony doesn't figure out a viable GP alternative and can't negotiate as many 3P exclusives/timed exclusives as they were able to with PS4 (for whatever reason). Even so, you're probably looking at a
1.2:1 ratio still in Sony's favor unless Microsoft can make serious inroads in some of the major foreign markets, and that might be where Xcloud becomes more of a factor.
If
EVERYTHING I just said plays out the way mentioned and Xcloud becomes a real option in markets where Xbox is weak in, then that could help in bringing parity with PS sales globally, but only if a hefty chunk of that Xcloud boom drives Series S/X sales. There's a good chance it may not, in fact that could also impact Series sales in regions like the U.S if a lot of the casual/mainstream audience turn to Xcloud & GamePass on their phone for gaming than getting an Xbox console (and in that case you can definitely expect PS's sale ratio advantage to stay high, anywhere between
1.5:1 to 1.75:1 is my guess; I wouldn't expect anything near a 2:1 advantage long-term since Microsoft aren't doing an XBO repeat and Nintendo looks like they're remain very strong with Switch and its successor).
But that's kind of the stealth brilliance in Microsoft's strategy; they don't actually
NEED high volume of console sales if GP subscription numbers grow and maintain healthily. That in turn could create a scenario where, even if Sony are heavily outselling them in hardware numbers,
the actual revenue numbers between Xbox and PlayStation divisions could be scarily close (it's already "only" a 66% advantage for Sony in spite of a 2.26:1 (126%) hardware sales ratio (PS4, PS5) over Xbox (XBO, Series)) and in terms of profit, Microsoft could actually generate more net profit with their strategy long-term versus Sony (and I'm just talking the gaming divisions here).
I think this is part of the reason why Sony are exploring more ports of games to platforms like PC, and driving some mobile game division growth, among other things;
revenue (let alone profit) doesn't scale linearly with hardware sales, and traditionally it's always been with revenue as the recessive factor. So you have to get creative with ways to increase revenue and, more importantly, profit margins if you have a decent idea where your "safe ceiling" is in terms of gauging off previous performance metrics. For Sony that's $70 games and for Microsoft, it's GamePass. Both approaches play to the strengths of the respective companies but Sony's method is also predicated on aggressively pushing high volumes of console sales as quickly as possible, while Microsoft's isn't as reliant on that factor.
Let's look at an extreme example. Let's say five years from now, Sony's at 100 million PS5s, and their FY revenues are $30 billion from the PS division. Assuming the other financial aspects of the company are relatively the same and their business model stays more or less the same, maybe we can guess that in terms of
net profit Sony pulls in
$4 billion from PS that year. Pretty good, right?
Now let's assume by some measure of bad decisions or whatnot Microsoft is at 50 million Series systems in the same time frame..but they're also at 50 million GP users paying for the regular GP tier ($120/year). That's $6 billion in subscription revenue from those users, but let's say
EVEN IF Microsoft put out $1 billion for 3P software content on GamePass for that year
alone, and they have to take out some additional $500 million for expense costs (both of these numbers are exaggerated, btw), that is still a
net profit of
$4.5 billion a year from GP subs alone. If they're smart, they aught to have a good deal more than 50 million total GP subs, you could say 75 million across console/PC/mobile and maybe even 10 million of those are doing some $1 conversion stuff but the other 15 million are GPU. That's an extra $2.7 billion on top of the $4.5 billion, or
$7.2 billion a year in net profit simply from concurrent GP subscriptions....and that's with having only 50% of PS5's console install base in terms of console sales.
While I don't 100% agree with Microsoft not disclosing hardware numbers, there's a reason they aren't hung up on them and it's the same reason even Sony have said that they are looking beyond console sales alone as a gauge for ecosystem health:
you don't need high volumes of console sales to increase profit margins if you have the means of providing other methods for content delivery. Subscription services like GamePass (and PS Now to a lesser extent) are one of those other forms. Once you have that going, metrics like console sales, while still important to a degree, hardly tell the whole story (and in a lot of ways they never have, i.e you can look back at systems like the SEGA Saturn having very high software attach ratios compared to PS1 in spite of PS1 selling over 10x the number of systems).
I personally don't really remember what subscriptions do I have right now even
www.google.com
