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[IDKFA]

They won 3rd place out of 3? Wow well done MS!!! They won a billion dollar loss on RROD extended warranties and redesigning the console.

I loved the 360 at the start of that gen and they took online console gaming to the next level but let's not fool ourselves the PS3 had a mega resurgence when they released the slim and finished strong with games like TLOU.

If we were to spin it, we could say Microsoft got a sort of victory over Sony in the early years of that gen.

Microsoft had all the goodwill on their side. The 360 had over a year head start and was a lot cheaper than the PS3. Sony really messed up the PS3 with launch with the price, delay and some might argue the decision to go with the Cell processor. IiRC, a lot of third party games looked better on the 360 than the PS3. Sony's PR was at a all time low. Remember the Wii60 movement?

However, after all that, Microsoft still managed to come behind Sony when the generation ended. The games dried up, the RROD hurt them and they wasted too much time and money on Kinnect.

Sony also managed one of the greatest come backs in video game history.

Microsoft gave Sony a bloody nose at the beginning. That's about it. Sony still ended up in a better position when that generation was over.

 

[PatientGamer]

and won? Xbox has been firmly is last place since it's first release in 2001.

Talk about revisionism lol.

 

[Embearded]

If you are purely looking at sales figures they didn't win, but there's no question that Microsoft had way more wins with the 360 in terms of software than Sony did with the PS3.

Pretty much every 3rd party game ran better, they nabbed a bunch of time exclusives, and the online service was light years ahead of PSN.

They were extremely competitive. Their best years imo.
But at best case scenario for MS, that generation finished with a tie.

 

[Karim]

One billion dollars spent fixing the RROD issues that generation because they put design aesthetics ahead of actual engineering.
So much winning!

How Microsoft spent $1 billion on a simple mistake with the Xbox 360 - Business Insider (2015)

Now let's not expect the impossible.

 

[Calverz]

What they did was the equivalent of AMD going from their current market share to competing with Nvidia, but on a bigger scale. People saying 'but PS3 won' are missing the point that beating the Playstation outright should have been impossible.

And then they threw it all away with the Xbox One.

100%
Look at console sales of the ps2. Amazing. Then compare this to the number of ps3 sold. Poor. Do the same for og Xbox vs the 360.….

 

[Chittagong]

It was an absolutely incredible launch. Everything clicked in place. Industrial design. UI. Games. Launch marketing. Brand name and branding. The most flawless marketing execution along with PS2 and Switch 1.

Edit. Also Wii was flawless

 

[Three]

360 had an impressive stretch of monthly NPD victories that the Switch eventually overtook.

Switch? You mean the PS4? Or you mean they had the record streak that switch beat?

It was an absolutely incredible launch. Everything clicked in place. Industrial design. UI. Games. Launch marketing. Brand name and branding. The most flawless marketing execution along with PS2 and Switch 1.

Bizarrely the 360 didn't perform very well during its launch year.

 

[Chittagong]

Bizarrely the 360 didn't perform very well during its launch year.

The brand was still way more niche than PS or Nintendo. Also Nintendo absolutely killed it with Wii in 2006, another monster branding case.

 

[Deerock71]

Switch? You mean the PS4? Or you mean they had the record streak that the Switch beat?

The 360 had the longest stretch of consecutive months in North America which has ONLY been topped by the Switch. I think it was like 18 straight months, if memory serves correctly, which was damn impressive.

 

[Kerotan]

When Xbox took on the PlayStation and drew.

 

[LavitzSlambert]

Great interview, Peter Moore is really understood the products he was selling, and what the market wanted. Definitely a key player in Microsoft's success in gaming. It proved Xbox was not just a Halo box, and a legitimate platform.

I found this part at the end really interesting:

"It was such a different vibe and environment for me, from being a president of Sega America, and bluntly fighting with my Japanese overlords on a regular basis. To being right in the middle of the decision making.

"There was nobody at Microsoft other than us that were making decisions. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer allowed us to get on with it… and we'd check in with them. They both had a great interest, Bill in particular, in what we were doing. But they also allowed us to be off-campus. We were not part of what's known as the Borg. We developed this camaraderie. It was refreshing to be part of that and not having to look around for somebody to make a decision. The decision was ours."

This was during the time where Microsoft considered Sony a platform threat. Meanwhile Nadella had Phil Spencer (and Xbox as a whole) on a leash the first few years of his tenure, finally let go of the reins (around 2018/2019), and yanked it right back due to the ATVI acquisition and changing economic landscape. Third party exclusives were cheaper, easier, and most important - faster than building up first party studios. Nowadays third parties need a larger audience to scale their sales, so we see exclusivity deals mostly going away. It's also not a quick solution considering how long it takes from concept to shipment.

 

[Xbox 360 slim]

The design WAS faulty.

Explains why the late 2008-2010 jasper fats with 65nm GPU's are still going? Lol, retard.

 

[reinking]

 

[Yekshemesh]

They tied at best. And, the xbox fanbase talks about this time like Al Bundy talks about his football career.

 

[SkylineRKR]

Its funny how Kinect in a way caused the downfall of Xbox.

Motion controls weren't a fad, remember? If you claimed this in 2009 or so you would get blasted for it. But what happened is that MS went all in on Kinect, and it was even the most succesful peripheral launch ever. It was even on Oprah lol. But something was off I found. They sold like 8 million in its first few months, and then after 2 years it was at 10 million?

Anyway. Motion controls were a fad after all. The Wii drop after 2010 was unprecedented. So much that PS3 and 360 ended up in whisper range of it in terms of units shipped. Nintendo banked on the Wii name with the Wii U, and had their biggest failure ever. The brand wasn't that strong it seems.

MS ofcourse, went all in on Kinect from its launch onward. Core games and support dried up. Gamers abandoned them. While Sony, who released Move as some sort of second fiddle, had a good back half with the PS3 and ended the console with a string of good software. Enter the 8th gen. Sony continued focusing purely on games. MS still pushed Kinect, jacked up the price with 100 bucks. MS were heavily beaten and to this day never recovered.

There are some what ifs here. What if MS continued what they were doing with 360 before Kinect. What if the likes of Peter Moore weren't replaced by hacks like Don Mattrick. Xbox One would have a sure fighting chance esp. in the US and Series would likely be in a better position. Phil called the 8th gen the worst gen to lose, you could call it bullshit because consumers simply purchase whats good and popular. But on the other hand I did go PS5 by default because of the extensive PS4 library I owned after those 7 years. Taking an Xbox as second console, perhaps, but not replacing it.

 

[Wulfer]

It's pretty clear who would have won without the hardware problems!