I guess MS' choice to have a weaker GPU last gen was the reason they beat out the ps3 for most of the generation?
They had a stronger GPU last gen.
worldwide this is accurate.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/10/analysis-worldwide-ps4-sales-at-least-40-percent-better-than-xbox-one/
In the US it's closer, but Sony has something like a million unit lead on the Xbox one. this generation is over, basically.
it is said that Sony took a gamble with GDDR5 and won, but I'm wondering now, say Microsoft had decided to invest in GDDR5, then with both console manufacturing needing millions of GDDR5 wouldn't the availability situation changed? making it more expensive/rare? or is the console market not significant enough that such situation would have happened?
The regular consumer doesn't know and doesn't care. It was the rumor/fact that nearly killed the xbox. People today still thinks the xbox is always online and drm fest.
In the end the platform with the best games will win just as it has been for every past generation, a shiny turd is still a turd.
Yeah I don't agree with this. Pricing, bad press and Kinect were the real issues.
People keep overlooking the extent to which multi platform franchises have come to dominate the market. Rewind to 2009 - PS3 had a ton of great exclusives, the price drop to $299, and still got outsold by Xbox 360. Why? That was the system most people played Modern Warfare 2 on. Microsoft's biggest mistake was ceding their advantage with third party software.Most of the popular games will be on both platforms.
I've said this a hundred times, but the people who launched Xbox One were the people who successfully launched Kinect. And those people took a mid-lifecycle product and turned it into a huge hit with expanded market messaging and disruption.
They lost sight of that context, however.
Basically their overall strategy was flawed
I think the its ' DRM + Kinect price is what screwed MS' whilst excluding the power difference by public perception is disingenuous.
Even though the public may not be as nerdy or into the fine-grain specs, they likely have that 1 friend that does and the general public does enjoy bragging rights + 'Which one is better': Translated, which is more powerful.
It is the era of new $500-650 mobile phones every other year, the price difference is a bonus/negative (depending on your perspective) but it can be negligible in a thriving tech-loving world.
The 360 came out a full year before the PS3 and it had many (at the time) next gen versions of popular games. That helped it a lot in terms of gaining a solid userbase and library at the time the PS3 launched.
The Xbox One had tough same-gen competition right out of the gate though. Both systems came out at the same time. It really isn't comparable. The system would have needed to be at least $200 less for it to have a chance at beating the PS4 worldwide.
It's not just the decision to go with DDR3 and a 32 MB cache of ESRAM. It's the lack of power of the GPU as well.
Sony sold out and buffed up their GPU about as well as they could while trying to keep costs down. Microsoft has more money than Sony, and certainly could have designed a far more powerful GPU - but they didn't. Even if this isn't manifested as a discernible difference in cross platform titles (though it appears to be, in terms of the resolution differences), it's all about perception. People know for a fact that the PS4 is more powerful. So, if the prices are similar, why go for the system with less power?
The 360 was weaker? PS3 had some worse multi plats than the XB1 will ever have. Funny this myth still exists, that cell marketing really did a number on folk
The biggest decision that hurt the x1 was the all in one machine philosophy. Where it should have been the games machine first philosophy.
The weaker gpu and ram situations were all secondary. Sony took a huge gamble on gdr being available in big quanties and it paus off. MS knew the tech roadmap and could gave put the $ from kinect BOM towards a better gpu.
X1 could have been the much more powerful machine. But nopes thanks to a fundamentally flawed philosophy frim get-go.
I only skimmed the article, but even though its poorly written the point is valid. That is the one decision that was bad (in hindsight) that they can't do anything about. Everything else, from the DRM to Kinect to pricing, has already been changed.
The X1 at launch really felt like a product of a corporate committee. I can imagine all of the meetings with people throwing around words like "synergy" and comparing the business to smartphones and app stores. They've already changed most of that, but the memory of it persists, and they're stuck with that RAM choice. Heck, they could probably retune all of that and bring it back and be successful, but they're still stuck with that RAM choice.
As much as people talk about exclusives, the largest volumes are the multiplats, and the PS4 is the better machine for multiplats pretty much because of that RAM choice, no matter what MS does.
I don't know. Sony got bit in the ass HARD for PS3 pricing. I would think a reasonable console price point would have been priority one, no matter what they tried to bundle in.
People keep overlooking the extent to which multi platform franchises have come to dominate the market. Rewind to 2009 - PS3 had a ton of great exclusives, the price drop to $299, and still got outsold by Xbox 360. Why? That was the system most people played Modern Warfare 2 on. Microsoft's biggest mistake was ceding their advantage with third party software.
Not really. You can remove a Kinect as they've already proven. You can't remove a poor RAM decision. That shit haunts you for the entire 5+ year console generation.
Well, there's always hope that PSN will improve, whereas the 180 of P ain't ever going to show up (at least not without side effects). The DLC stuff happens on both platforms and sucks for the consumer. I'm comfortable going with CODAW on PS4 to collect my Ps despite it.Just because the PS4 might have 180 more P's does not make it the better version.
MS have locked up DLC for a month and Xbox live is still considered the superior service.
Well, Microsoft lead designers and engineers aren't that stupid. The DDR3 ram was the only way to gurantee 8gb ram for all the planned kinect and television features. ESRAM was just an attempt to fix that nonsense done by the higher management.
Well, Microsoft lead designers and engineers aren't that stupid. The DDR3 ram was the only way to gurantee 8gb ram for all the planned kinect and television features. ESRAM was just an attempt to fix that nonsense done by the higher management.
Yes.
And IIRC Sony already had most of the world's GDDR5 manufacturing capability tied up.. so even if MS had wanted to change course and react.. they effectively couldn't have without massive hardware shortages.
ALL THOSE PEOPLE?I mean, they already let all those people go from inside MS so there's the proof enough
It was Microsoft's decision to go with 8GB of 2133MHz DDR3 RAM and 32MB of eSRAM memory for the Xbox One, while Sony opted to go with 8GB of 5500MHz GDDR5 RAM for the Playstation 4. This was terrible judgment on Microsoft's part, and if they lose the console war they can point to that decision as the cause.
We're seeing this in the PC add-on market too. Why do you think the 980/970 only launched with 4Gb configurations when there are already games using more than that? I wouldn't be shocked if we see graphics cards next year with upgradeable RAM if this keeps up.
ALL THOSE PEOPLE?
But that's false. The savior President Phil Spencer His Holiness was a key team member in both the design and the launch of Xbox One. And what about the "TV TV TV" guy from the reveal? He's still on the XBox team. I imagine most if not all of the non-public-facing employees, developers, middle-managers, and team leaders who were involved in the XBox One's design and marketing are also still there at Microsoft.
The only "key figure" to leave was Mattrick. That's it, isn't it? I simply do not understand the narrative of "Xbox One is clean now because all the bad people are gone and now all the good true gamer executives are involved". It is the opposite of the truth.