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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

The generational gap is insane. In Finland a vast majority in the PS3/360 days were in the green team. The next generation? It was rare to see anyone with an Xbox One. The pendulum swang hard.

As a 360 user those days I saw some of the writing on the wall. Xbox E3 events focused hard on American features which turned the Xbox to a smart TV box. Aside from games we gained nothing for most of Europe.

With the upcoming streaming revolution all you really needed was a Netflix app. Not the dozens of TV features made for NA based users. None of these features tied customers in and as soon as PS4 released people just jumped ship. Games rarely worked throughout generations anyway.

So in summary: Xbox Live won over vast numbers of gamers to the new multiplayer console era, but in my geographic location people just jumped back to Playstation because PS Online gained feature parity.

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We didn't want those features in NA, either. It was a ton of really bad direction from the top. Execs weren't really sure why they were in the gaming business at all[1], so Matrick tried to branch the division out into other areas: a focus on OTA TV (no one under 40 who games watches OTA TV); bundling Kinect; leaping into the locked in digital-sales-only model way too early. It was really demoralizing for the Xbox team and definitely lost them the generation. They seem to have recovered for the Series generation.

[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/phil-spencer-is-exactly-wh...

They lost a lot of customers on the "you won't own the game on your disc" debacle, too. The idea that the publisher would get a portion of every resale of a game, even on disc, really pissed people off. The publisher was even able to deny the resale!

Who thought that was going to please the end user? It's so customer-hostile that I couldn't believe they said it out loud, let alone at a major conference.

https://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-publishers-will-decide-on-re...

This one is really fascinating. Now, ten years later, physical sales are trending towards nil, and all digital sales are permanent with no resale at all. They had their eye on the future, possibly even a better future than the one we ended up with, but they were too early with it. And the messaging was absolutely godawful, as you say.

I stuck to XB1 for backwards compatibility and Gears of War, but on the other hand I failed to see an obvious advantage to the PS4.

What's the "killer app" of the PS4? Apart from exclusives, both seem similar. Both seem to be considerably worse as a media box compared to the good old 360 with it's magnificent built-in DLNA compatibility and CD-ripping.

PS4 is a gaming device with similar hardware, the "killer app" is going to be a game.

It seemed to me that Sony invested a lot more than Microsoft in making games during the PS4 era. Microsoft seemed to think Gears of War and Halo were "good enough" while Sony was producing a lot more exclusives. Microsoft must have realized they were getting slaughtered due to lack of games since they started buying gaming studios towards the end of this era.

PS4 killer app was option to buy bare bones ps4 + gamepad package vs Xbone taking forever to enter some european markets and insisting for so long that I asolutely need to pay much more because only bundle on market is one with Kinect I have zero interest of using.

It also had very strob library of exclusives. If somebody told me I’ll spend 400h in front of TV playing souls game I would’ve laughted them off, but Bloodborne did it. They also had other strong titles like Uncharted, Horizon, Last of Us.

The killer app was definitely the exclusives, no amount of features would make up for missing out on playing a lot of the best games in that time period.

Remember that at launch it was $100 cheaper and more powerful. Multi-plats on PS4 outperformed Xbox One almost always. Usually the PS4 version was 1080p native, Xbox One 900p. Plus storage could be easily upgraded with a screwdriver. And you got the exclusives too.

All of the Xbox One's benefits mainly came later when they added backwards compatibility, 4K Blu-ray support, Game Pass etc.

Killer apps for me: Games was HZD and Spiderman. Hardware was rechargeable controller, and the PS4 itself. All my friends' xboxs would get stuck updating and they would have to force restart several times. Nothing like that has happened to me on my PS4.

> What's the "killer app" of the PS4?

At least for some gamers that I know: PlayStation VR

Wasn't Xbox One defined by the massive backlash to its TV features, Kinect etc and Microsoft had to backtrack hard? It's not a Finland only thing you are seeing. Xbox is of course a American favourite but it faced the brunt there as well.

Not to mention that momentum was clearly with Sony towards end of the PS3/360 era and Microsoft killed all their momentum with the reveal. The results that we saw with PS4 and Xbox One are clear.

Don't forget Don Mattrick's behaviour during E3 2013. The arrogance and utter disdain shown towards gamers is the stuff of legend.

People think backwards compatibility helps keep people on your platform - but it’s often the opposite. You have an Xbox and the next time you buy a PlayStation which you can use to play the games you missed, or vice versa.

Xbox stopped focusing on exclusive games (admittedly a benefit to PC players!) and tried to make the Xbox an all-in-one TV box. Honestly, I think the rise of smart TVs with all the same apps did them in the most though. The idea was good at some level, but they didn’t forsee TVs themselves becoming a competitor.

It makes sense looking at the previous generation - I know that I bought a PS3 because it was also a blu-ray player so I can see Xbox wanting to take advantage of that.

There were plenty of really cheap streaming boxes and sticks even at the time, an HDMI input for cable TV not being the future was very obvious in 2013.

Can you explain what you mean by the "green team" phrase? Not familiar and google searches are not clearing it up. Thanks.

It means they were on the Microsoft / Xbox side (Xbox is heavily green colour-branded)

xbox is logo green, playstation is blue

Ahh got it, thank you.

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