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The days of seeing stories like 'PS4's outselling Xbox by almost 2-to-1' could be over as Microsoft looks to have called time on the console sales war.
Last week saw the Big M announce its quarterly results - yes, yes, fiscal announcements, yawn - but the interesting thing noted by Game Informer was the lack of Microsoft's usual hardware shipment metrics.
When quizzed on this a Microsoft source responded saying it was no longer using such figures as its measurement of success. Instead it would be focusing on user engagement, choosing Xbox Live figures as its leading stat. Essentially Microsoft has made a tacit announcement that, in terms of hardware sales at least, it has lost the sales war of this generation of machines.
Long-time industry analyst, Michael Pachter, told Fortune yesterday that he believes Sony's PS4 is set to have another excellent holiday period, outselling Microsoft's console, and would probably do so with or without the price cut which has given it price parity with the Xbox One.
"Microsoft should cut price only if it cares about how many consoles it sells," he went on to say.
And, given that it's both halted reporting on its own sales and refused calls for a price cut of its own, it sure looks like Microsoft has now stopped caring about such figures. Or at the very least wants everyone to stop talking about it...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aichon on Monday October 26 2015, @10:25PM
The goal of the Xbox was always to act as Microsoft's Trojan Horse into the living room. It was never about having the best console; it was about having control over the living room experience. Back when the first Xbox launched, they even stated as much openly, with it being one of their key goals for the product line. That's why they were willing to sink so much time and money into it over the years. It was a long-term investment to make sure that they had a seat at the table when living rooms finally became connected. The 360 set them up well, the culture was finally willing to accept "smart" functionality on TVs and in living rooms, and they had been spending years revamping their OS so that it would be a more consistent experience across all of their devices, including the Xbox. They bet it all on the Xbox One.
And then the Xbox One launched to poor acclaim.
The so-called "console wars" are really just a small front in the much bigger war for the living room. It started out as a handful of minor skirmishes between dozens of players, but all of the big players realized where things were going a long time ago and started architecting grander plans for how they wanted things to move. Sony and Microsoft tried to approach the living room from the high-end via game consoles, but that was by no means the only way in. Apple, Amazon, and Google have been entering the space from the low-end via set-top boxes and the like, as well as establishing massive content ecosystems of apps, videos, and music, but there's clear indications that they don't plan to stay confined to the low-end, with the just-released Apple TV (which has roughly console-grade computing power) being the clearest indication of their long-term plans to grow upwards.
Meanwhile, companies like TiVo and Nintendo don't even seem to be aware that there's a bigger war going on around them, which is why they've both been blindsided by the major changes happening in the markets they play in. Nintendo has had its lunch eaten by Android and iOS, neither of which are products that people think of as "gaming" products, simply because they didn't realize that their skirmish was part of a larger war that included a lot more competitors. Likewise, TiVo's market has shrunk dramatically as the newer set-top boxes have come in with cheaper subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, and other services that enable users to cut their cable entirely. I'll add Valve/Steam and Razer to the list as future failures/confined to niches, since they're fighting as if they're in small-scale skirmishes, when, actually, they're fighting against the technology world's superpowers with their devices that mirror a PC to the living room (things which Microsoft, Apple, and Google all can already do, albeit, not to gaming-grade quality yet).
Anyway, this is all a long way of getting around to the point: that right now is the make-or-break time for dominating the living room, and Microsoft knows they've missed the boat so far. They're either cutting their losses, confused about what to do, or are going back to the drawing board so that they can come back with something more compelling. We'll see in time which it is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @10:48PM
Blah blah... yeah war for the living room and all that, whatever you said.
But what it boils down to is that it takes 5 minutes to turn the TV on nowadays.
(Score: 1) by machineghost on Monday October 26 2015, @10:52PM
To be fair, the Tivo people did see the writing on the wall years ago, and added support for Hulu, Netflix, etc. to their boxes. This would have, if they had been smarter, positioned them *perfectly* to appeal to cord cutters: "use our awesome UI to manage your antenna channels, then use our also-awesome UI to watch Netflix, YouTube, whatever."
The problem is, while they worked really, really hard on the TV UI, they treated the other sources as a side project, and even when they truly merged them in ("Season Pass" => "One Pass") it was incredibly poorly executed and resulted in a terrible user experience.
IMHO Tivo is still the very best DVR out there, and no one even comes close to beating it for managing "normal" TV. But when I want to watch Hulu or YouTube my $50 Roku is far more responsive than my $500 TiVo, and more importantly it supports Plex and Crunchy Roll (which Tivo doesn't).
Standard big company problem: someone sees that the ship is going off a cliff, but the institution is too slow/inept to act fast enough.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tathra on Tuesday October 27 2015, @01:58AM
nintendo has always, for more than century now, been a gaming company. i don't know that its that they're oblivious to the "war" going on around them, but more that they don't care, they just want to provide fun and entertainment to their customers.