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Console Wars


TheMightyEthan
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Fair enough. I put it in this thread because I consider the Ninty stuff to be documenting how the Wii U is losing the console wars hard.

 

edit: Nintendo has much more cash on hand than Sony, at least compared to its overall exposure to risk, IIRC. That pumps up its valuation a ton, since it's literally money in the bank. That article is before the January 16th announcement from Nintendo lowering sales estimates across the board , though, so I think we'll see lower valuations of Nintendo soon to take its floundering into account. 

Edited by Mr. GOH!
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Well short of them being literally identical one console is always going to be more powerful than the other(s).  Gen 7 it was the PS3 (though due to the architecture it took a long time for that to have any practical benefits), Gen 6 it was the Xbox, etc.

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Yeah, it used to be part of "Entertainment and Devices" division, which was mainly kept around for Bing and Windows Phone. Since Ballmer's reshuffle of MS last year those are now in different divisions and Xbox is pretty much it's own section, quite ready for the new CEO to decide if they want to jettison Xbox as it's own company or keep it in house despite the money and logistics drain that provides fuck all for Microsoft as a whole. It's the only MS division that has intense competition due to stepping into a market with intention competition. From an MS perspective it's pretty much just a front for Bing (advertising, search and proto-assistant), and that can go through Nokia when they complete the merger.

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Ballmer rejigged it. Xbox is now part of "Devices and Studios". It put everything from Xbox One through to Xbox Music in one neat package separate from their OS, Office and cloud packages.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/jul13/07-11onemicrosoft.aspx

 

Xbox One has been quite good for their revenue this financial year, but I'm not sure for Microsoft something being profitable is enough reason for them to keep something around if it's so separate from how they usually work. Xbox was meant to put Microsoft in the living room, and over a decade in and it hasn't really managed that. They just ended up being completely blindsided by tablets in the living room space. Sony got their consoles working for them because they didn't do OSes and Productivity software, but music and movies. CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray.

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  • 4 weeks later...

The people who own an Xbox One at this point probably don't care, what should be concerning for Microsoft, is the people currently on the fence about buying an X1, those are the people who would care about spending 100 dollars more for worse looking games.

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How's this for a dystopian image of the future?

 

Someone in the company may be happy that the consoles are providing a presence for the company in your living room, but at some point investors arre going to want to see some hard cash out of it. You do have to wonder how long these big companies will continue to plough money into areas that aren't providing a good return, they certainly won't continue out of any sort of sentiment toward the gamers.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So essentially the console wars can be defined as:

Gryffindor = PlayStation

Hufflepuff = Nintendo

Ravenclaw = PC gaming / Steam

Slytherin = Xbox 

 

 

Pretty dead on if you ask me. Slythern even uses the colour green.

Edited by The Cowboy Poet
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  • 2 weeks later...

Well apparently part of Xbone's graphics problem is the amount of GPU time reserved for the OS and Kinect.  From a Digital Foundry interview about Titanfall:

 

 

 

It's known that Microsoft is attempting to free up precious graphics resources. Last year, the Xbox One architects told us that the GPU "time-slice" - the amount of processing time reserved by the operating system for elements like Kinect - would be made available to game developers. Respawn confirms that this hasn't happened yet.

 

"They were talking about having it available for launch and I think there were some issues for how it was going to work," Baker tells us. "It's not available for launch but we're definitely going to take advantage of that if they give that as an option. And the plan that is they will make that an option, so when it's visible we'll enable it for our game and we should be able to crank up resolution proportionally."

 

So not only is Kinect a lame baby toy that you don't need, that makes the box $100 cheaper, but it's actually negatively impacting the core games that people actually want to play.  Maybe now that Mattrick is gone MS can start backing off Kinect, since my understanding is it was really his baby.

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  • 3 weeks later...

http://www.geek.com/games/ps4-ships-7-million-worldwide-outsells-xbox-one-in-europe-71-1589841/

 

PS4 approaches 2:1 sales over Xbox One, with a 7:1 gap in Europe. As it notes though Titanfall did just recently hit, which could sway it a bit in Xbones favour a little bit (though PS4 also had Second Son, so who knows)

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