GSD European (September 2023) - PS5#1 (+175%) / EA Sports FC24#1
- Thread starter Evilms
- Start date
He had Ballmer for that.Microsoft are all about the brute force.
Ironic, since Bill Gates...wasn't very physically brutish.
I had a really long post outline partially drawn up arguing that Sony should call Microsoft's bluff and let them put Gamepass on Playstation (which pretty much kills Xbox but also risks Playstation's status as a closed ecosystem with a single unified front end.) But it just doesn't make sense, even if you don't think streaming is the future you still have to control game sales via having a closed ecosystem, which such a plan would risk losing. Too much risk to yourself to merely speed up Microsoft's demise if you think they are going to go away anyway.
I agree with him, drop 35% when you already was distant third is a much harder task.
Many chairs flew across offices around the time MS employees starting going to Google.
You definitely have a point... I was thinking about how they might be able to do it without damaging the closed ecosystem too much.
One idea I had was to make it part of the PSPlus Premium tier, since I find that offering to be the least enticing, maybe increase the price a small bit and make it mostly just Xbox / MSFT owned games.
Dunno if it would work on a deep level.
MS is a trillion dollar company. They’re doing bad because they’re incompetent. That’s all there is to it.
I think if you look at things objectively, it is apparent that Xbox is effectively geographically isolated to being competitive only in North America.
That is a huge problem, especially after buying 2 large publishers. They are lucky that they can lean on PC sales a bit to soften the blow...but it's still overall a negative for the industry, when the games could have sold 30%+ more if PlayStation had been a launch platform.
It also highlights the flaw in the logic of PlayStation doing PC ports, globally PC is now the real competition for PS5 and is more and more becoming the place where you can get almost everything. There are major issues with PC...games launching broken, poor optimization, shader compiling etc but Sony need to really consider halting all PC ports and treating PC as a serious threat, particularly in Europe.
To see Xbox sales slump so much in just the 3rd year is worrying... I often ask if Console manufacturers do enough to make their products and software accessible in developing nations.... streaming isn't the answer, there should be better regional pricing and payment plans in countries where currency is weak etc.
That is a huge problem, especially after buying 2 large publishers. They are lucky that they can lean on PC sales a bit to soften the blow...but it's still overall a negative for the industry, when the games could have sold 30%+ more if PlayStation had been a launch platform.
It also highlights the flaw in the logic of PlayStation doing PC ports, globally PC is now the real competition for PS5 and is more and more becoming the place where you can get almost everything. There are major issues with PC...games launching broken, poor optimization, shader compiling etc but Sony need to really consider halting all PC ports and treating PC as a serious threat, particularly in Europe.
To see Xbox sales slump so much in just the 3rd year is worrying... I often ask if Console manufacturers do enough to make their products and software accessible in developing nations.... streaming isn't the answer, there should be better regional pricing and payment plans in countries where currency is weak etc.
Canada has regional pricing!
We pay 50-70% more than US prices for everything, regardless of exchange rate!
Yep and it's only growing faster as more Xbox players move to PC as well as all the new pc handhelds coming out, Sony is literally handing over their market share and 30% fee to Valve.
New chart for UK. Xbox is flat compared to last year. Starfield did nothing 
Thread https://icon-era.com/threads/uk-sep...umped-44-in-september-uk-monthly-charts.6704/
www.gamesindustry.biz
Thread https://icon-era.com/threads/uk-sep...umped-44-in-september-uk-monthly-charts.6704/
Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo console sales jumped 44% in September | UK Monthly Charts
3.5 million video games were sold across the UK last month, a slight rise of nearly 1% over the year before (GSD data).…
www.gamesindustry.biz
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Problem is, I don't think Microsoft would want that. Remember, it would involve porting their first party stuff to PS or, at least, running it all through cloud servers, which I suppose is doable. Surely they'd hardball and say it was a full PC or Xbox suite that you buy as Gamepass. Remember, their goal is to build Gamepass before their competitor services launch, and PSPlus is a competitor. If you ran something like that as a PSPlus extra tier that cost as much as regular Gamepass does now, maybe? But like I said, when I did the pros and cons in my head there just don't seem to be any "everybody wins" deals to be had. The trick of my post, which would have been titled "Gamepass on Playstation, a Modest Proposal" or something like that, was that everyone came out of the deal thinking they were a winner.
and as more Xbox players filter over, more of that hate for playstation infests the PC crowd.
The messaging and intention becomes more aggressive and misleading.
I don't think ALL PC efforts need to be halted; that platform can still serve a good purpose for some of the GaaS titles like those from Bungie (Destiny 2, Marathon), and some of the ones Sony's studios & partners are cooking up. Though, Sony need to cut back on the 10-12 GaaS planned over a 3-4 year term down to 3-5. The idea of needing to make 10-12 just to have 1-2 be successful was always BS IMO; they don't need that strategy for the non-GaaS titles, and while maybe it applied to said games in the past, dev time and iteration time for non-GaaS titles in prior gens was way quicker so studios & teams were more agile. That's not the case these days, industry-wide.
PC could be good for the GaaS titles (well, most of them, anyway) and legacy remaster compilations of catalog games. Say for example, a remaster compilation of the Resistance games. Maybe even halfway remaster/remake versions of those games where the visuals are the same (better resolution support tho) but new QoL features are added and, for games with MP, re-enable online play support. I think stuff like that and GaaS titles could be Day 1 across both platforms. But for the non-GaaS modern releases? Those should either be heavily staggered between console and PC (I'm talking like 4-6 years after initial release, and preferably when a new installment in the IP or game from that studio is ready for console within the next 1-2 years), or just skip PC altogether.
At least until Sony want to push their own launcher & storefront on PC, but that won't even be necessary until the latter half of next decade IMHO. Way too soon for that right now; consoles are more than viable for this gen and another gen (at least for Sony and Nintendo, maybe not so much Microsoft).
New chart for UK. Xbox is flat compared to last year. Starfield did nothing
Thread https://icon-era.com/threads/uk-sep...umped-44-in-september-uk-monthly-charts.6704/
Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo console sales jumped 44% in September | UK Monthly Charts
3.5 million video games were sold across the UK last month, a slight rise of nearly 1% over the year before (GSD data).…
Depends what "flat" really is for Chris. LOL
Series is doing worse than XBone.
That's been the case since the end of last year but it really became widely known around late Spring onward after a few reports.
