07-15-2023, 10:45 PM
(07-15-2023, 01:02 PM)Tucker's Law wrote: I'm not a fan of MS having even more developers and IP's under their belt, given their history of killing studios and sunsetting brands they buy. That said, I'm also not a fan of Sony doing the arrogant-ass Sony thing again, and if we're really lucky maybe a stronger xbox brand will bring them back to fun and creative Sony.Sony has never been fun and creative though. Their advantage has always been the ability to design and manufacture their own hardware much like Apple allowing them to sustain platforms longer than the competition and opting for cheap media like CD's in favor of cartridges ensuring that publishing costs for third parties are low and retailers get a better cut. They always win on the boring margins and actually sell hardware at a profit.
The platforms that failed didn't have those advantages. The PS3 was too expensive to produce and had to be sold at a significant loss and the PSP/Vita had expensive UMD's and cards.
Sony can now heaviliy discount the PS5 and drop the PS5 Slim soon and Microsoft can't lower the price of the Series X or set-up a manufacturing line for a Series X 'Slim' that yields a cheaper product because most parts they need are probably more expensive to source now than they were 3 years ago.
The reason Microsoft lost this gen, is that they favored production of Xbox cloud servers over Xbox Series X consoles, meaning the PS5 supply issues were fixed about 6 months earlier.
Next they decided to focus on producing more Series S than Series X consoles for the 2022 holiday season that didn't sell. Without boxes to sell there was nothing to promote and without anything to promote the boxes don't sell.