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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!

 

[nial]

Good reminder that even the PR disaster that was the $499 / $599 PS3 managed to outsell the Xbox 360 on its first full year on the market, 2007 (YTD), and that the latter was at its peak when riding the motion gaming wave from the Wii when the Kinect was new in 2011. We all know what happened to Nintendo once the fad was over.

I mean, they did certainly right in NA and the UK, which is were the bulk of sales came from, but it certainly doesn't make much sense that they only managed to be neck and neck with a console that was a PR disaster from left to right. Compare the consoles' sales and you will see:

2005:

Xbox 360: 1,5M unit sales (November 22, 2005)

2006:

PS3: 1,7M unit sales (November 11, 2006)
Xbox 360: 8,9M unit sales

2007:

PS3: 8,7M unit sales
Xbox 360: 7,3M unit sales

2008:

PS3: 10,7M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,8M unit sales

2009:

PS3: 12,4M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,2M unit sales

2010:

PS3: 14,4M unit sales
Xbox 360: 12,1M unit sales

2011:

PS3: 14,1M unit sales
Xbox 360: 14,9M unit sales

2012:

PS3: 11,8M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,1M unit sales

2013:

PS3: 7,6M unit sales
Xbox 360: 7M unit sales

Both consoles had similar sales between their respective launch window + first year periods of 14 months (10,4M unit sales), while PS3 had a better respective launch quarter, despite missing the EU market. PS3 then went on to outsell the Xbox 360 in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013, while the Xbox 360 only managed to outsell the PS3 in 2008 (by 100K unit sales) and 2011, which was the peak CY of the console at 14,9M unit sales, thanks to the Kinect boom.
I often see people claiming that Microsoft managed to take advantage of Sony's fuck-ups, but nah, I don't really see it; at least not on a global scale. Isn't it quite sad that the Xbox 360 only managed to overcome its undeniable decline on the market and get to new heights thanks to riding the casual wave generated by the Wii, you know, the period where people usually say that Xbox lost its direction?

 

[MayauMiao]

Nope

Damn good CEO though, really enjoyed Xbox when he was at the helm

Went to shit with Halo 4, Kinect and the gay avatars everywhere

XBONE really got destroyed by TV TV TV SPORT SPORT SPOSTS.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

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)

Not quite.

It was because of a last-minute change of the rules in EU that required lead-free solder. The console PCBs were not designed for it, and so the heat dissipated from the chips would eventually cause the solder to soften and the chip's connections to fail.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Not quite.

It was because of a last-minute change of the rules in EU that required lead-free solder. The console PCBs were not designed for it, and so the heat dissipated from the chips would eventually cause the solder to soften and the chip's connections to fail.

In the book Race for a new game Machine which chronicled things from IBM's side MS was so preoccupied of having a lead time over Sony that shipped knowing this flaw full well. Also documented how they got to steal a lot of research from Sony as they got the PPE core Sony had financed the development of.

 

[ShakenG]

The last great xbox console and it was amazing. Whether it won or lost.

 

[ValiantInstance]

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:



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.

I've said it before but the man is a walking W. If MS had any sense they'd oust Phil and beg Peter to come back and make Xbox cool again.

 

[LavitzSlambert]

I've said it before but the man is a walking W. If MS had any sense they'd oust Phil and beg Peter to come back and make Xbox cool again.

He'd never do it, he wouldn't work for Nadella unless Xbox was given complete control and a worthwhile budget. It's pretty clear what Microsoft as a company thinks of Xbox at this point.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

He'd never do it, he wouldn't work for Nadella unless Xbox was given complete control and a worthwhile budget. It's pretty clear what Microsoft as a company thinks of Xbox at this point.

Indeed, the suits run Microsoft Gaming now and Phil Spencer is merely a yes man who toes the company line.

 

[Astray]

The only reason anyone can say Playstation beat the 360 with a straight face is because enough time has passed since that people don't really remember how dire the PS3 years were. Scrapping by on unit sales because developing and undeveloped countries that spend noticeably less on software preferred the PS3 and calling that a win is laughable when even the head honchos at Playstation admitted they couldn't afford another generation like that one with the PS4.

Remarkably ignorant.

The PS3 is actually the point where Sony began to get itself and developers actual software money in my region, prior to that people bought illegal copies as a way of life.

 

[Lucifers Beard]

Xbox 360 had an amazing few years whilst Playstation were fumbling around with the launch of the PS3. Shame that Microsoft couldn't keep the momentum and ended up focusing resources on shite like the Kinect, which was a massive waste of time.

By the time Killzone 2 dropped, I was mostly playing on PS3. Then it was Uncharted 2 and many others that I was more interested in. I ended up selling off my 360 by the time 2011 rolled by since there just wasn't much I was interested in, plus the online for PS3 was free, so it was a no brainer to just play my online games there.

The one thing I disliked about the PS3 was the mandatory installation of most games, which took fucking forever. Especially MGS4, what a nightmare...

 

[Barakov]

But the PS3 ultimately outsold the 360…

 

[Karim]

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.….

Still see the sales numbers of ps360 and think it's both success and failure depends of the company perspective it's not surprising to see collapse the xbox.

 

[Calverz]

Still see the sales numbers of ps360 and think it's both success and failure depends of the company perspective it's not surprising to see collapse the xbox.

I don't think so. I don't think sony looks back at the ps3 as a success. More like a misstep they learned from at the time.

 

[Karim]

I don't think so. I don't think sony looks back at the ps3 as a success. More like a misstep they learned from at the time.

I said the exact contrary. For Sony ps3 is failure and for MS x360 a success with the same comparable numbers. Just that make think why is ended like this today.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

I got a 360 the day Gears launched and PS3 just didn't interest me at launch. The 2007 lineup is honestly one of the best ever, completely spoiled for choice both in terms of first party exclusives (Halo 3, Crackdown, Forza 2, PGR4…) and third party timed exclusives (Bioshock, Mass Effect…)

I ended up waiting until late 2008 to get a PS3 (grabbed one with MGS4, LittleBigPlanet and WipEout HD)

Over the course of the generation I started playing PS3 more. MS would lose Bungie and Epic and their franchises suffered, the focus on Kinect just made me lose interest.

Sony had a great comeback in the second half of the generation with games like Uncharted 2, God of War III, Journey and Last of Us, big multiplayer like GTA5, LA Noire and Portal 2 also started running better on PS3.

 

[alabtrosMyster]

Xbox never won a generation, unless you only count the US market, but that would be cheating.

 

[Shane89]

never happened

 

[reinking]

Just to get past the "Xbox didn't win" comments. What if we agree it was a generation in which Xbox did not lose? They were rocking and Sony was feeling the pressure. Unfortunately, they stopped focusing on games and continue that trend to this day.

 

[Hector Hall]

Won?

More likely, had a head start and gave up a good fight, but ultimately lost.

 

[Hector Hall]

Just to get past the "Xbox didn't win" comments. What if we agree it was a generation in which Xbox did not lose? They were rocking and Sony was feeling the pressure. Unfortunately, they stopped focusing on games and continue that trend to this day.

Things is it had a 11million head start when PS3 launched, replaced all the RROD counting them as new sales, and gave it for free the last year's buying some Windows +Office packages. Even with all that, it lost, and the last year's of Kinect were quite sad (even though it gave a sales boost in 2011).

 

[calico]

I bought two 360s and they both died. Hassle free console gaming my ass.

Ok so PS3 had about two good games, but I still regularly use it for streaming etc. ~20 years later

 

[SABRE220]

The 360 was an absolute brilliant console(outside rrod), my god they came out swinging. I remember when i first saw gears running on that thing everyone had their jaws on the floor. It even had amazing releases from Japan, like Lost Odyssey. Then came the absolute juggernaut that was Halo 3, Mass Effect, and so on. They absolutely shocked Sony and had them scrambling to regroup and get back in shape after their arrogant launch. While they didnt beat Sony in the end which is kind of embarassing considering their lead it dosent change the fact that they stole nearly 50% of their market share as a underdog and cemented themselves as a real threat, it helped that that they smacked Sony back into shape and it lead to one of the best gens for me as both a owner of the 360 and ps3. It still makes me sad how badly they fumbled from that gen.

 

[Gitaroo]

Probably the first half of its life cycle then Don Matrick happened shifting focus on only rely on 3rd party heavily and disolving their own first party and Kinect....

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

PS3 managed to draw that gen. Sony would rather wished they did it differently as they only managed to Draw by losing all the money they ever earned from PS1 and PS2. Good will cost money.

If PS4 failed they would have gave up. Because at that point they are starting from scratch. Thankfully for Sony, Xbox made an unforced error with kinect.

 

[PendekarRajawali]

Xbox didn't win but Xbox 360 offered a better experience on it, I owned both PS3 and 360, still keep the 360 until now.

 

[Celine]

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

Yeah, it started slow; same for PS3.
Launch aligned PS3 was almost always ahead of XB360 and ultimately sold slightly more.
On the other hand Nintendo's Wii skyrocketed from the very beginning but tappered off earlier.

 

[TDiddyLive]

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

Talk about revisionism lol.

Sounds like you're the one doing the revisionism. Xbox 360 was ahead of the PS3 the vast majority of that generation. PS3 finally overtook Xbox just a few months before the PS4 and Xbox One came out.

 

[MayauMiao]

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

Bizarre? We all knew very well why.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Bizarre? We all knew very well why.

This actually increased sales

Microsoft didn't even acknowledge the problem until 2008, I remember mine braking not long after Halo 3 came out and having to buy another.

At the time it was worth it though, Halo 3 was addictive as fuck.

 

[chromatic9]

They won the US with a much larger install base but then lost it all. Xbox 360 library and xbox live was supposed to keep all those buyers on board for the next console, it was billed as the gen not to lose yet somehow all those Americans jumped ship and we have the following gen as the one not to lose. It's just an excuse for doing poorly. Xbox had an open goal in the US.

 

[MayauMiao]

This actually increased sales

Microsoft didn't even acknowledge the problem until 2008, I remember mine braking not long after Halo 3 came out and having to buy another.

At the time it was worth it though, Halo 3 was addictive as fuck.

Because of the RROD it makes me question the actual sales of the 360.

To me it damaged the brand and I almost bought the 360 before that disaster.

 

[Three]

This actually increased sales

Microsoft didn't even acknowledge the problem until 2008, I remember mine braking not long after Halo 3 came out and having to buy another.

At the time it was worth it though, Halo 3 was addictive as fuck.

Yeah, MS only recognised the issue in mid 2007 (2years after launch). The consoles needed time to fail so if anything the failures boosted sales until the 2nd/3rd year when they had the repair/warranty program.

 

[Hector Hall]

Sounds like you're the one doing the revisionism. Xbox 360 was ahead of the PS3 the vast majority of that generation. PS3 finally overtook Xbox just a few months before the PS4 and Xbox One came out.

360 was one year earlier in the market, it's but normal the PS3 had to narrow that gap (10.5-11 million) the first years.
By end 2010 it had catch up, but 2011 saw Kinect explode in the US, it was the best year of the 360 shipments wise and stopped a bit the overtaking and delayed it so it happened in the last year..
But,laumchs aligned and with both on the market, aside 2011 the PS3 always won the year.

 

[ShadowkillXNA]

360 absolutely capitalized on the early launch of the PS3 stumble. It took a while for PS3 to catch up and pass the 360 both in terms of sales and quality of 3rd party games.

It was also far ahead when it came to online play.

PS3 obviously won when it was all said and done, but let's not pretend the 360 wasn't kicking its ass for a while.

Brady and the Patriots obviously won that superbowl, look but let's not pretend that the Falcons weren't kicking their ass 28 - 3 for a while.