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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 iamjacksusername on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:57AM
The console wars are over. Roku won. Netflix won. Amazon Prime may pull something out. HBO just jumped into the race but they have a good chance of pulling ahead.
Nintendo could have pulled their head out of their ass 5 years ago and made a game boy phone and carved themselves a niche with Apple-sized profit margins.
Sony owns the hard-core gaming market - why compete? They have been trying to make Playstations the family entertainment centers since the PS2 and it has not moved out of the more hardcore gaming market. Mom and Dad still just buy the cheapest DVD player at Best Buy or whatever.
Microsoft has some of the pieces - Lync communication appliances, table sized touch PCs, a very profitable cloud business but they need to build a partner hardware eco system where connectivity makes sense. Google started it with Nest but Microsoft has some potential killer apps with their 3D research - medical and anybody doing mechanical site surveys should be very excited. But these are all business applications. For the moment, though, it does not make a ton of sense to keep losing money on a gaming console. From a long term view, I can think of four reasons why Microsoft would keep the XBox.
1. Microsoft thought it is worth the money to keep their expertise in the industry to be leveraged later for some future purpose as yet to be announced.
2. Keep the flow of big name titles coming to PC. DirectX is DirectX so the port from XBox to PC is not so hard compared to a port from PS3 or PS4 to PC.
3. To be a compute delivery endpoint for Azure. E.g., if you have a network of sensors in your house monitoring things in real time, the XBox packages the reading and sends it to Azure for some analysis, the analysis is done in Azure and an action is computed and sent back to the XBox, and the XBox delivers the commands to the appropriate controller.
4. Microsoft buys HBO (or Netflix but HBO seems more likely) to use XBox and HBO to become the dominant media delivery platform.
5. Some combination of the previous four suggestions.
I think the real question MS has to consider is how long stockholders will let them keep losing billions every year for some future, phantom payoff that has never happened since the first XBox.