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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: 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.