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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: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday October 27 2015, @12:08AM
I agree--I think the Sega Dreamcast deserves more credit than it gets. That was one of my more favored consoles out there. MS had a hand in its demise as part of the xbox strategy, or so the popular wisdom goes. (How many windows ce games do you think came out for it...? and did the xbox ever have any windows ce games?)
(and, as long as I am on the subject of old consoles, I think the Atari Jaguar could have been something special but then Atari got in its own way, as usual. Laugh if you will -- many things from that platform still exist in some shape or form today in modern consoles.)