Sony takes early lead in next-gen console wars but it’s not over yet
The PS4 versus the Xbox One will be a long protracted battle, but out of gate Sony seems to have gotten its messaging right and is smartly courting gamers with what they want to hear.
The Xbox One will cost $499, comes with an integrated (and reportedly improved) Kinect motion control sensor, and all kinds of controls and limitations on how you own your game — or really, Sony’s games. Likely in order to combat piracy — and to potentially send a death blow — to the used game reseller industry, Microsoft’s limitation of games affects boxed copies of games and includes lending a game to one friend for free, as long as they have been on your Xbox Live friend list for 30 days. Games will only be allowed to be traded in at participating (i.e. approved) retailers, and only if a game’s publisher enables it, which could come with a fee.
And unrelated, but also angering gamers, is that while the Xbox One will not need a persistent internet connection to work, it will need to connect online once every 24 hours to continue to work. Some of these restrictions have been labelled anti-consumer.
Meanwhile, Sony’s PS4 has a price tag of $399 and announced no such restriction on used games, and no need for its console to ever phone home and check in.
In some ways, this is a complete reversal of fortunes from the beginnings of the last console war, when it was Sony who launched the PS3 a year after the Xbox 360 at a price of $599 and completely screwed up the launch of its console for the first year of its existence.
Now, to be fair, Microsoft’s attempt to control games is not all that different from some of the digital storefronts that exist, like Steam and iTunes, but the company has gone too far this time by restricting a packaged product. Another troubling issue is why Microsoft hasn’t told consumers the reason for the restrictions or explained to gamers why they should pay $100 more for their console that comes with more strings attached.
Microsoft’s policies clearly benefit companies and the corporations that make games, but with the consumer revolt taking place online the potential net effect is that it will be ceding the multiplatform (games that are available on more than one console) game market to Sony.
The sub-$400 price point is important to gamers, so it’s likely that this holiday season, when both consoles are released, many gamers will initially purchase a PS4 and then wait until there’s a Microsoft-exclusive game that they must play or furtively wait for the eventual price-drop. That was one of the things that really got the PS3 out of its initial sales funk last time around.
The truth is save for the contentious differences, both of these giant companies generally copy each other. Xbox is going to start giving away free older games, formerly a hallmark of the PlayStation Plus subscription program. Conversely, PlayStation is now going to require gamers to pony up a fee to play online, just like Xbox Live. Actually, one complaint for both of these big companies is the dearth of any actual new ideas for this next generation.
The other issue is that many of the biggest games coming out this year — Grand Theft Auto 5, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Watch Dogs — will be available for the PS3 and Xbox 360, which makes it even more difficult to justify purchasing the new consoles. In reality, other than improved graphics — which are already pretty amazing on the current consoles — neither has really made a particularly strong case to purchase the next generation consoles, save for the fact that they are the hot new things.
Realistically though, in our tech obsessed society that’s probably enough for many gamers — even with strings attached.
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