Ah, your perspective is interesting, but you're looking at it backwards! First, let's get to some answers to our discussion by asking some questions.
Why is the customer not there? Is the customer not there because your competitor is doing exceptionally well, or is the customer not there because your brand is unsatisfactory to them? Random, but does a reviewer's opinion carry more weight than the opinion of thousands of actual users?
It's easy to blame the customers for the mistakes of the business -- in fact, that's one of the first lines of defense for a failed product. "Our stuff was ahead of its time", "They just don't get it", "What more do they want?", etc. By doing this, you are effectively saying "Our stuff is perfectly fine as it is". Arrogance and ignorance are an extraordinarily dangerous combination in a business. When you can do no wrong then you can never improve, when you can never improve then you can never grow. If your business cannot grow then you are in biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig trouble.
The answer as to why Halo 5, Forza 6, and Rise of the Tomb Raider are high-profile failures isn't because the customer isn't there and is busy playing Knack. The answer as to why they're failures is because the Halo, Forza, and Tomb Raider brands have been damaged due to a number of severe miscalculations by the Xbox business.
You cannot forget the fundamental truth of branding: a brand is your identity! If your identity is tarnished then people will not want to interact with you. Let's start with the first-party stuff. The Masterchief Collection and Halo 4, part of the Halo brand, are the predecessors to Halo 5. Do you remember what people were saying about Halo 4 not feeling like a Halo game -- being a departure from Bungie's way of things? Since the Masterchief Collection is fairly recent, I'm going to assume you recall the large community outcry over the game not working? Forza 6, part of the Forza brand, is the successor to Forza 5 and Forza Horizon 2. You must remember what the reaction was to Forza 5 incorporating microtransactions? What about people saying Forza Horizon 2 was just like Forza Horizon 1 -- do you believe making the same game and expecting customer satisfaction is realistic?
Now let's talk about Rise of the Tomb Raider. Do you believe fans of the Tomb Raider brand were satisfied by the decision to turn Tomb Raider into Uncharted Lite? Do you think that Microsoft's decision to lock the Tomb Raider brand to their brand (for an unspecified amount of time [at the time]) was a decision that was met with open arms by the Tomb Raider community -- the very same community that showed up to support the last two multi-platform entries? Do you believe that positioning Rise of the Tomb Raider right next to Fallout 4 was a decision that inspired faith in Tomb Raider fans, or do you believe it was a decision that led to fans actually questioning if Microsoft was trying to kill the brand? Did Microsoft satisfy fans of the Tomb Raider brand by making the Tomb Raider bundle exclusive to one retailer?
News items, written articles, Vines, podcast impressions, threads on Neogaf: these are all points of contact between your brand and your customer. Nobody here is fooled by a Metacritic score: we all know what happened with the last Halo games, we all know what happened with the last Forza games, and we all know what happened with Rise of the Tomb Raider aka the worst example of affinity marketing since Haze on PS3. If people are turned off by the brand then they're out. If people who play the game don't like the game then they're out. We can either spend all day claiming the customer's didn't show up because they all went to PlayStation, or we can realize that there are millions of people with Xbox One's, and the reality is the customer's didn't show up because numerous miscalculations by Microsoft have left them unsatisfied with the respective brands.
Second, since this is an NPD thread, allow me to put out a sales-related question pertaining to the above discussion: Do you believe the PS4 version of RotTR will perform much better than the Xbox One version, given that your reasoning for the atrocious performance on Xbox is due to the much smaller installbase? Since the Xbox One installbase will be higher next year and beyond, do you believe Halo 6, Forza 7, and Fall of the Tomb Raider will do better in North America than Halo 5, Forza 6, and RotTR?
To tie this entire block of text back to my original prediction, I'll state what I believe is happening and what we'll see happen at the end of the generation. Hopefully the following can give you my perspective on what the released sales numbers mean. Globally, the Xbox One is a failed product that has hurt the Xbox brand. What's happening in regions outside of NA is that people are choosing to exclusively support the PS4 because due to a number of public and private miscalculations, the Xbox brand is now considered unfriendly to people who want to play videogames. This is just what I believe is happening. The effect of this is by the end of the generation, the Xbox brand equity is going to be in the toilet. The value of the Xbox brand to consumers is going to be lower than its ever been, and the value of Xbox hardware to Microsoft is going to be lower than the amount of hours spent trying to play Uncharted 4 on Xbox One. I think by the end of this generation, we're going to fully realize that the Xbox Two requires Sony to make PS3-era level of mistakes in order to have a shot. As always, anything can happen and I could be completely wrong in everything, but I have a feeling that the more deliberately convoluted press releases we get from Microsoft, the more we'll realize how badly Microsoft handled the Xbox brand this generation.
