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regift_of_the_gods writes:
"The results from the 2013 holiday season through January are leaking in, and they look grim: not great for Sony, bad for Microsoft, terrible for Nintendo. The PS4 seems to be outselling the Xbox One but both are far behind their respective sales totals of 2006/2007, when they faced off with the previous generation of consoles. An anonymous developer quoted in the TechCrunch piece notes: 'There are 2+ year old GPUs that outperform these boxes, and even budget GPUs releasing now in the $150 range outclass these machines... This means whilst the casuals are moving to mobile/web, the high end enthusiasts are moving to PC where games are better looking. The traditional consoles are caught in a pincer movement.'
Sony has just completed a round of layoffs at its Santa Monica game studio. Meanwhile, the future of Xbox within Microsoft remains cloudy, with the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer and the ascension of Stephen Elop as head of the Devices and Services group, which includes the Nokia/Lumia handsets and the Surface tablet as well as Xbox. There are rumors that Microsoft is negotiating to sell the Xbox division to Amazon, which seems to be trying to enter the game platform industry. Elop wrote the (in)famous 'burning platform' memo when he was CEO at Nokia, as a prelude to abandoning the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems in favor of Windows Phone; he also stated last year that he would consider divesting Xbox and Bing if he was named CEO."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Monday March 10 2014, @10:33AM
Indeed, and the article doesn't consider the enormous leviathon of a recession between the two consoles. The last generation was released at the peak of a boom, and this one at the tail end of a squeeze.
I also wonder if using X86 hardware will eventually be the undoing of Sony and MS. The last generation wasn't so easily portable to PC, and a lot of games were kept exclusively for the consoles, or had dreadfully coded PC ports. There was a lot of talk at the time about the PC being more or less dead as a gaming platform.
Now porting it will be trivial, the PC has a nice publisher friendly DRM platform in Steam, and for gamers they can save a lot of money in hardware and game purchases (remembering PC games are often significantly cheaper).