Is it just me, or did it seem to be more of a whimper than a Holy War?
The week after Xmas and I saw great piles of Xbones at Best Buy and a pile of PS4’s at Costco. Sure, they both claimed ‘a million units sold in the first 24 hours’, but consider total Xbox sales at 80 million-ish, and 81.6 for the PS3…and 157 million for the PS2, and another 100 mil for the Wii…
I was all in for the last generation, had two 360’s, a PS3, and a Wii, and remembered them being REALLY hard to come by on first release.
Of course, there weren’t phone/tablet app stores back then, either.
For me, nothing will ever compare to the PS2 vs. Xbox vs. Gamecube war. I didn’t buy all of them, but I genuinely had no idea who was going to win before the consoles came out.
PS2 ultimately came out way ahead, but I actually remember discussing the battle well before the consoles came out.
I know that I’m going to give it a year…I’ve just got too much into the 360, and the PS3 games are gettin’ cheap (Blockbuster closing sales) and there’s no backwards compatibility.
I don’t own either but the impression I got from various sources was “Neither has any great games at launch to demand getting one (much less exclusives) so you might as well wait and keep playing your 360/PS3”
I don’t totally understand your point. You’re comparing the sales numbers of the new gen consoles about 1 month after release to the lifetime sales numbers of the last gen consoles? Not sure what point you’re trying to make there.
Either way, PS4 is much harder to come by than the Xbone right now. Xbone is in all the stores but PS4’s seem to be out of stock everywhere except Costco in cyberspace.
Also, I’ve read in multiple places that another reason this gen launch has been smoother is because both Sony and MS were able to produce a much larger quantity of hardware for the launch than they did for the 360/PS3 launches, which has made it much easier to pick up the hardware this first month. You couldn’t even sniff the taint of a guy who’s cousin could find you a 360 or PS3 if you didn’t buy it on day 1.
It’s true as well that there aren’t any must have games for this launch that aren’t already available on last gen consoles. Once Watch Dogs was delayed I think it took a bite out of the early adopter crowd.
I’m still on the 360 because of the lack of must have games. I thought about going over to the PlayStation for this generation, but it ends up coming down to the games and exclusives and what’s available. The only thing that I think I’m personally missing is the early DLC for Destiny when that releases.
I do plan on picking up an Xbone for Titanfall, though. Had that or Halo 5 been a release title, I’d probably have been all over it.
The question is: Did they get better at supply chain management (as I’m seeing all the consoles I care to buy, the week after Xmas), or is the demand less? (due to things like console fatigue, tablet/phone competition, etc.)
Take a step back and ask yourself just exactly how many people decided go or no-go based on a delay on Watch Dogs? (yeah, yeah, I know, Halo, Gran Turismo, Mario Bros <insert title here> can all drive initial console sales.)
I’ve seen 30 of each console in two separate places, anecdotes not equaling evidence, I was asking if it was a thing or not.
Personally, I think the console war was really won back with the Xbox/PS2 and Xbox 360/PS3 fights.
Most people who play consoles have a group of friends who are already “locked in” to one or the other due to the earlier consoles (i.e. they have Xbox Live or Playstation Plus accounts), and will continue to play what all their friends play, which is probably the next generation of what they already play.
AFAIK, there haven’t been large-scale defections of players from one console to the other in either direction. That’s why the console wars this time around seem so lackluster- they’re just trying to get the few people who don’t have a dog in the fight already.
Demand is clearly not less. The Xbox One sold 2 million and the PS4 sold 2.1 million in their first month of availability. That is good for the second-best console launch of all time and the best console launch of all time, respectively.
A lot of journalists are trying to make “console fatigue” a thing (these same journalists cranked out “Nintendo is doomed” articles a month earlier), but the numbers don’t bear it out (Nintendo, by the way, isn’t doomed). Personally, I think the console war is more or less done. There will always be fanboys and they will always be bitching about the other guy or talking up their system of choice, but the vast majority of gamers has moved on. And I say, thank god.
Well, I can say that the vast majority of gems I’m interested in (and there’s not a lot of them) are all multi-platform. I tend to buy something like the Bio-shock series on the 360, then pick up a steam sale 6-10 months later and play them again on the Mac. The gamer son has been really into Minecraft in the past, is now a TF2 addict, and those were available everywhere.
I picked up TombRaider (360), Crysis 2 (ps3), and dishonored (ps3) for about $30 last week. It’ll be a LONG time before I use up the games I’ve got.
Wii’s were hard to come by for years. PS3 I saw piles of in every store a week after launch. They were never hard to come by, and it took a good long time for Sony to get their heads out of their asses and figure out how to move them. 360 was somewhere in the middle. Maybe a little hard to find at first, but nothing like Wii (or PS2 at first).
The PS4 and XBone aren’t very huge leaps over the last versions, at the moment. They have the capability to eventually be better, but right now it looks like “the graphics aren’t better, there’s just more of them.” Plus, the XBone has a bunch of social media crap that I don’t want. I’ll get a PS4 when a new Uncharted comes out.