Microsoft and Xbox will soon realise what being a market leader means. Sony will over take them on this front as well.
This ironic for Microsoft as they very well know this from there Azure business.
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If Xbox makes the market leader copy them than that’s great for Xbox’s strategy too and with it being such a consumer friendly feature, it’s great for all of us. Competition is great. If Sony moves to copying Xbox (yet again) and starts offering a feature that honestly should’ve been standard ever since everyone started pushing digital purchases, then that’s objectively awesome! Would love to see it. Maybe I’ll consider buying a Playstation again. We all know the walls the consoles put up are keeping new gamers out as much as they’re keeping the old guard in, tearing down those walls benefits the industry and gamers. I don’t want Xbox to be the only platform offering Xbox Play Anywhere. It just is and industry wide adoption has been slow because they’re Xbox (Xbox tax from media, but also they aren’t the market leader with as much clout and pull among publishers). I mean it’s kinda weird to imply that this is a bad thing. Xbox losing to Sony in console sales hasn’t led to less games supporting Xbox, in fact we see more third party support than ever for the console. If Sony adopts a PROPER “stream your own game” strategy and cross entitlement (cross purchase) with native PC versions, then there’s no reason why that’d negatively affect Xbox’s own programs. In fact it’d probably encourage more publishers to more seriously treat those features as basic and ship more Xbox games with them.
Like one thing the article mentions is Sony exploring their own Playstation PC store (like the Xbox App) and play anywhere. Sure that’d take away a differentiator from Xbox games, but it also means Sony would HAVE to make all their exclusives day and date PC and suddenly they’re all playable from day one on the hybrid next Xbox. Additionally if you’re a PS gamer and some third party games become Playstation Play Anywhere with PC, then you can actually keep some of your library if you switch to the next Xbox hybrid PC or Windows PC in general (which Microsoft still owns and is making the gaming experience more directly like Xbox now). Regardless competition has made the market leader give ground. Full console exclusives from Sony will be gone and potentially libraries will become less locked down, and that’d only make windows & a hybrid Xbox more attractive.
I doubt that. Sony is way behind and pretty much has nothing to offer. I’m not sure what their angle on PC would be.
They can shift direction, invest in change, and carve out something that makes sense for them long term.
I’m with Shawn Layden that proprietary gaming hardware loses its purpose over time. I think Sony knows that. Supporting general compute devices and cloud is the way. Sony is in a position where they can slow walk it and probably still set themselves up for long term success.
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Sure, they can it’s just hard to see seeing they’re not a very consumer friendly company and the moves Xbox is making would be really hard for them. Perhaps they could like Steam go the Linux way seeing as they might be able with the name recognition be able to increase that Linux 3%. I’m not sure they will be able to compete with Xbox NextGen if they intend to try similar as services and PC is more Microsoft’s turf.
That’s exactly it. I feel like no one wants to admit that Xbox has the right strategy and at the end of the day Microsoft is going to win just by having the by far dominant PC gaming operating system. Sony could try giving Microsoft the middle finger by going all in on windows but that’d just be so dumb. Even of Steam users Valve themselves report less that same less than 5% on Linux.
Something I find interesting, in that no one is talking about it, is that the most recent PS5 sales estimates are at 80 million. I mean I know GTAVI is coming, but this generation is nearly over (in terms of when new hardware will be released). Are PS5 sales going to surpass 120 million before then? Or even 100 million? Both Xbox and Playstation reported “faster than ever” sales at the start of this gen, but numbers tampered out quick and neither were ever going to hit their peak. Consoles aren’t growing and yeah they still support tons of people (especially with how long last gen is still supported) who are spending increasingly more, but at the end of the day the writing is on the wall. Leveraging windows and coalescing it with Xbox is a future proof strategy that will really pay off. Centering a gaming business and platform around specific hardware just doesn’t work anymore. Playstation admitting that only supports Xbox’s strategy. I don’t think we’re that far off from buying game “consoles” becoming like buying android phones or any other tech hardware where they all basically do the same and support the same software. And as much as gaming media wants to kick and scream otherwise, the future is coming. Even Nintendo can only raise prices so much and rely on their core users so much. And at the end of the day only one of the three own Windows.
If Sony wants to tie MS in terms of features they’ll need to copy the Play Anywhere initiative across a lot of titles as MS has it for over 1000 games I believe already, and for it to make sense it requires cross save files to work and in Sony’s case, Trophies to be implemented as well in the PC versions of all titles, including 3rd parties. A PC app with only Sony titles will get no traction whatsoever so it needs to be a single point to get all of your games, just like MS is trying to achieve on PC.
MS has been investing in this initiative for years, with an integration deep on the system level that will be hard to match by anyone else and also includes cloud streaming and console streaming straight in the app, plus achievements and MS Rewards and so on.
Sony now has to convince all 3rd parties to join in on this PC initiative and we know that soon MS will also probably include previous gen games available in some fashion in the as well which is something I guess Sony could do with emulation, but I have a feeling they won’t.
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PlayStation has been doing cloud streaming for far longer than Xbox, of course they have more contracts for games to be on their cloud service if you own them. They bought OnLive and Gaikai how long ago? They have zero chance of competing on a “play anywhere” setup like Xbox does, though.
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They bought the two leading Cloud Streaming companies and technology in 2012 (Gaikai) and 2015 (patents from OnLive). Those moves and how Sony priced PS Now was entirely to make sure it did not cannibalize their console market.
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