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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, Interesting) by DonkeyChan on Tuesday October 27 2015, @06:14AM
When the xbone (feel the contempt) was first announced with their included kinect features and always on components I figured they'd have to back-peddle it. I try to think about all the weird conspiracy things that arise even if most don't pan if only for the academic practice of keeping my mind open. I couldn't believe they were building in what amounts to a spying platform and thought for sure it was hyperbolic. I was wrong.
MS built into the xbone remote wake functions for all hardware that's attached to it including internal DNS and routing tables for C&C servers that piggy back the XBL pipe.
Every piece of hardware can be polled from a pseudo powered on state using these functions and then turned on without notification (lights etc).
I can't see a real reason for just those two things. Ads can't be it, it's way too much just for targeting ads on a platform that already requires an identity just to play games.
I dismissed it all and chalked it up to corporate overreach.
Then win10 came out. There is no non-specious reason they've given us to relay all the data it does. Again this could be framed as corporate overreach, if you ignore that they were at least equally intrusive with their "game" console. The way they've tricked people into downloading win10 and all of the things I'm not going to post here as we've all heard them only lead to one end in my mind.
They're a company. They're being paid to do this.
The risk is too great unless they ALREADY had funding to cover the potential market shrink. They don't use these metrics in the article because their measure of success is how many SLA's they can meet in feeding data back to their government arm. They couple this with their AD revenue on these devices and they can grow with 25% of the market they once had. Their contracts cover any loss from the introduction of this surveillance framework. Even removing the word government from this section and it is still a surveillance framework, but it's only for "ads" right?
They get us used to it, make it ubiquitous. We're the frog in boiling water not jumping out because the temperature is being increased gradually. They keep "patching" win 10 with "important" security updates that just redirect their telemetry when a certain percentage starts getting blocked. They hide the content of these updates now when they used to explain exactly what they were for. Their response to that specific grievance is that the platform for describing the security updates isn't built out...But somehow it was in place during winXP. They're lying for a reason.