I'm evaluating them ultimately from their technical prospects and on a long timeline. Sony has a bright future as a content curator no doubt. It's their hardware business I think looks shaky.
Consider a future where TV sales dwindle, cannibalized by personal screens like tablets and headsets. Or imagine smart tv platforms clamping down on media that they don't get a cut of (anything over that 'obsolete' HDMI port).
Those trends are slowly underway, and part of the reason the console segment is not just stagnating, but shrinking. Sony has a big piece of a shrinking segment and no easy way to move to the other gaming segments. Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
If we could define the console wars as: who will escape the console segment before it disappears? That is the lens by which I say Sony has the worse hand. They're more likely to become an Atari or Sega at this point than Microsoft is.
> Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
But what does it matter that Microsoft owns the OS? They don’t see a dime more because of that except for the OEM Windows fee and tiny sliver from OS ads.
Steam is the predominant sales platform on PC, which again Microsoft doesn’t earn a dime from.
Sony has ported or is porting all their successful 1st party and 3rd party games. Nothing is stopping them from doing that for all the games they think customers care about. And the supermajority of customers care very little beyond current gen, maybe one gen back.
I don’t see consoles shrinking a whole lot either (once you cut out the spike from COVID). I use my PC with a bunch of fancy tricks and Big Picture and it still has plenty of weird bugs. The most recent annoying one is having to manually override DPI scaling on Ori, and choosing my TV as the monitor for Ori and Halo MCC. Funnily enough both Microsoft games (although I am not saying Sony’s games would fare much better).
Maybe that a revival of Steam boxes / Steam machines will change that in the future.. or hell, maybe the EU breaks open the console walled garden. Who knows.
Microsoft has been doing Microsoft things to boost the Xbox app and game pass. Having a huge back catalog to fill their store gives them a leg up over say, Epic's game store, which also wants to enter the space.
It's a huge hill to climb to catch up to Steam's market share, but we've seen Microsoft leverage Windows to climb similar hills time and time again. The strategy is at least viable enough that Valve has been shaking in their boots for years, trying to build up a war chest of games on Linux. The Steam Deck is a great strategic accomplishment for them.
Consider a future where TV sales dwindle, cannibalized by personal screens like tablets and headsets. Or imagine smart tv platforms clamping down on media that they don't get a cut of (anything over that 'obsolete' HDMI port).
Those trends are slowly underway, and part of the reason the console segment is not just stagnating, but shrinking. Sony has a big piece of a shrinking segment and no easy way to move to the other gaming segments. Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
If we could define the console wars as: who will escape the console segment before it disappears? That is the lens by which I say Sony has the worse hand. They're more likely to become an Atari or Sega at this point than Microsoft is.