PS4 vs. Xbox One Price Battles
I completely glossed over an important fact when Microsoft unbundled the Kinect from the Xbox One and the PS4 continued to outsell the Xbox One.
Firstly, in most countries that makes the PS4 and Xbox One the same price. This hasn't helped things (or at least not enough). But, perhaps more importantly, in Canada the PS4 was actually expensive at that point. Sony raised the prices by $50 shortly after launch blaming the falling value of the CAD as the reason. Which makes the price differential the same as the current temporary price drop in the US.
Absolute cost can be as important as relative cost. So, there is no guarantee that the outcome will be the same. But I don't think it will be substantially different. The price drop will undoubtedly appeal to some, but I never really thought that the price was the sole reason the PS4 was outselling the Xbox One. Sony and idiotic gamers the world over lost their shit at the original Xbox One unveiling and Sony successfully helped direct the angry mob to hate Microsoft.
Granted Microsoft failed market the original plans in a good fashion. And backpedalling on the features angered as many people as announcing them did. But that is the heart of the problem. The image.
Analysts who think such small changes in pricing will cause an immediate or even steady reversal in sales are morons. Two things are MUCH more likely to improve sales. One is the current practice of updating the console monthly with new features driven by community feedback. And the other would be making sure sales staff are up to date on these changes and incentivized to talk to them when people ask. The PS4 may have a better GPU, but the Xbox One, feature wise is now the clear winner with customizable home screens (in beta, but public next month), media player that can access external media and servers, support for external drives on top of the features it had at launch like HDMI pass through and OneGuide.
A tertiary thing Microsoft needs to get off its ass about is Azure. They need better tooling/API's or something. Because very few titles are leveraging the cloud and very few are doing so in meaningful ways. With the GPU gap, they really need to get developers of XB1 exclusives using this more. If every exclusive title to the Xbox One did just 1 impressive thing that would be impossible without it, it could serve to highlight the fact that on hardware alone both consoles suck, but at least one isn't limited.
What would have been a great example if it weren't cross platform would be Assassin's Creed Unity. The game is supposedly not running at max resolution and frame rates because the AI is too CPU intensive, so the both the PS4 and Xbox One are affected. Undoubtedly, some of that AI work could be offloaded to the cloud servers so that the console CPU isn't the bottleneck. Games with large living worlds can have all work outside of the users current "zone" offloaded with only the local area running natively on the console.
The "power of the cloud" isn't going to magically give the Xbox One better resolutions and frame rates. But with better tools and API's and a bit of work it can undoubtedly give the edge back to the Xbox One. And that might be good enough to start swaying both gamers and developers back.
Firstly, in most countries that makes the PS4 and Xbox One the same price. This hasn't helped things (or at least not enough). But, perhaps more importantly, in Canada the PS4 was actually expensive at that point. Sony raised the prices by $50 shortly after launch blaming the falling value of the CAD as the reason. Which makes the price differential the same as the current temporary price drop in the US.
Absolute cost can be as important as relative cost. So, there is no guarantee that the outcome will be the same. But I don't think it will be substantially different. The price drop will undoubtedly appeal to some, but I never really thought that the price was the sole reason the PS4 was outselling the Xbox One. Sony and idiotic gamers the world over lost their shit at the original Xbox One unveiling and Sony successfully helped direct the angry mob to hate Microsoft.
Granted Microsoft failed market the original plans in a good fashion. And backpedalling on the features angered as many people as announcing them did. But that is the heart of the problem. The image.
Analysts who think such small changes in pricing will cause an immediate or even steady reversal in sales are morons. Two things are MUCH more likely to improve sales. One is the current practice of updating the console monthly with new features driven by community feedback. And the other would be making sure sales staff are up to date on these changes and incentivized to talk to them when people ask. The PS4 may have a better GPU, but the Xbox One, feature wise is now the clear winner with customizable home screens (in beta, but public next month), media player that can access external media and servers, support for external drives on top of the features it had at launch like HDMI pass through and OneGuide.
A tertiary thing Microsoft needs to get off its ass about is Azure. They need better tooling/API's or something. Because very few titles are leveraging the cloud and very few are doing so in meaningful ways. With the GPU gap, they really need to get developers of XB1 exclusives using this more. If every exclusive title to the Xbox One did just 1 impressive thing that would be impossible without it, it could serve to highlight the fact that on hardware alone both consoles suck, but at least one isn't limited.
What would have been a great example if it weren't cross platform would be Assassin's Creed Unity. The game is supposedly not running at max resolution and frame rates because the AI is too CPU intensive, so the both the PS4 and Xbox One are affected. Undoubtedly, some of that AI work could be offloaded to the cloud servers so that the console CPU isn't the bottleneck. Games with large living worlds can have all work outside of the users current "zone" offloaded with only the local area running natively on the console.
The "power of the cloud" isn't going to magically give the Xbox One better resolutions and frame rates. But with better tools and API's and a bit of work it can undoubtedly give the edge back to the Xbox One. And that might be good enough to start swaying both gamers and developers back.
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