There’s no special sauce left in hardware. This last generation of consoles consisted of two computers and an Android tablet. The home boxes are whatever AMD could achieve within a $500 MSRP circa January 2020. Nothing to scoff at - but nothing amazing.
There is no need for separate consoles. It does not serve the consumer interest to have two incompatible releases of every single game. This isn’t a console war. It’s a format war.
Despite Sony’s success in past format wars, their position now is especially precarious. They don’t have a backup plan in this industry. Samsung ate their lunch. Their movie business looked shaky even before quarantine killed theaters. Music’s doing alright, somehow, despite nobody buying music. But their entire presence in the video-game industry, outside some first-party titles, is built on their blue computer being incompatible with Microsoft’s green computer or your actual PC. It is distinction without real difference. And where Microsoft can afford to “lose” any given generation - Sony can’t.
Sony is left desperately perpetuating the market structure that supported the PS2… when hardware shaped games. That’s been flipped backwards since the PS3 and 360. Multiplatform is god. Sony’s been coasting on momentum and popular fiction for almost twenty years. They’ve had some Nintendo-ish incomparables, like VR support, but they didn’t embrace that. Instead they chose to continue gambling on bribing developers for exclusives, and eventually outright buying studios.
Microsoft has always had the ability to undercut that. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen a decade ago. They kept hinting at it, with Xbox stuff on PC… but leave it to MS to show up late and not commit.
Forward the death of platforms.
There’s no special sauce left in hardware. This last generation of consoles consisted of two computers and an Android tablet. The home boxes are whatever AMD could achieve within a $500 MSRP circa January 2020. Nothing to scoff at - but nothing amazing.
There is no need for separate consoles. It does not serve the consumer interest to have two incompatible releases of every single game. This isn’t a console war. It’s a format war.
Despite Sony’s success in past format wars, their position now is especially precarious. They don’t have a backup plan in this industry. Samsung ate their lunch. Their movie business looked shaky even before quarantine killed theaters. Music’s doing alright, somehow, despite nobody buying music. But their entire presence in the video-game industry, outside some first-party titles, is built on their blue computer being incompatible with Microsoft’s green computer or your actual PC. It is distinction without real difference. And where Microsoft can afford to “lose” any given generation - Sony can’t.
Sony is left desperately perpetuating the market structure that supported the PS2… when hardware shaped games. That’s been flipped backwards since the PS3 and 360. Multiplatform is god. Sony’s been coasting on momentum and popular fiction for almost twenty years. They’ve had some Nintendo-ish incomparables, like VR support, but they didn’t embrace that. Instead they chose to continue gambling on bribing developers for exclusives, and eventually outright buying studios.
Microsoft has always had the ability to undercut that. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen a decade ago. They kept hinting at it, with Xbox stuff on PC… but leave it to MS to show up late and not commit.