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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

And after that, in typical Microsoft's mismanagement, Xbox One happened and they haven't recover ever since.

It boggles my mind that Microsoft of all companies cannot seem to understand that building a software ecosystem requires first attracting developers to a platform. Make that platform attractive and remove friction.

They manage to screw it up more often than not, and then wonder why nobody buys a Zune or a WMR headset or a Windows phone or an Xbox...

or in the case of the zune, only making it available for sale in 1 country when the ipod was being sold in most major countries. i had to buy my zune hd off of ebay. its not really surprising it didn't do as well as the ipod

If they haven’t figured that out by now, they never will.

> If they haven’t figured that out by now

That's an unusual way to put it. That a platform succeeds by attracting developers wouldn't be new information for Microsoft. They are famous for being extremely outspoken about that very viewpoint. Steve Ballmer gave a famous speech with the line "Developers, developers, developers, developers!".

Indeed. The "HowTo" part of it seems to be what they struggle with.

You ever look at the app store? How about the app store for Windows phone?

Have you ever known someone who had a goal that they hadn't already achieved?

I wonder if Microsofts PC marker canabilises their Xbox market.

I've got a great gaming rig, if I was to get another console on top of my switch it would always be a PS.

It kind of does, because with turning XBox into a brand for games that can be played anywhere, PC or via streaming, it kind of devalues the console itself.

Why bother buying the games console, if the same game is available by other mechanisms, the exact same game not a port.

Is Xbox doing poorly? I don't know much about the console space, but it looks to me like a continued success

Xbox One was a big mismanagement as they tried to pivot into a multimedia device, with lower focus on gaming and they angered the gamer community responsible for the XBox 360's success.

They had to back pedal from that, brought in Phil Spencer, highly acknowledge in the game industry, he rebooted the whole XBox One approach, re-introduced the indie development support (yet another thing dropped in the meantime) as ID@Xbox program.

The pandemic delivery issues with the Xbox Series X and Series S, and the fact that dev teams have to consider two different hardware models when targeting the XBox made it less atractive than targeting the Playstation or Switch.

So even though they managed to recover from the mess with the XBox community, the efforts to recover from it have left it on a third place in regards to overall sales.

Phil Spencer wasn't brought in, he was just promoted. He was already head of Microsoft Game Studios.

I stand corrected then.

It's doing fine, but Sony is (again) doing a bit beter. Although it's a bit of a loaded question here, since Microsoft integrated Xbox and Windows gaming ecosystem.

The current situation is actually pretty nice - there are three big players with big market shares from which neither has a clear monopoly.

Microsoft is seriously thretening to break that by buying themself a monopoly in game publishing though.

There were always three big players, previously Microsoft's place was owned by SEGA.

Which resonates more than surface level of that statement you made. Xbox is pretty much next gen SEGA hardware and SEGA was ultimately driven to the ground by a guy that kickstarted Xbox (nasty people would say as a prize)

I hadn't thought much about this, but you're so right, it's so refreshing that there is such healthy competition in this market.

From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_co...

Xbox One (2013) sold 50 million Units compared with PS4 (2013) selling 113 million units.

Xbox X/S, their 4th gen Xbox, has sold less than 21 million units since 2020, when it was released, compared with PS5's 38 million units in the same timeframe.

Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming for me, I don't know how others feel.

The console gaming industry has stopped growing. And as a result both Microsoft and Sony seem to be now trying to cannibalise each other to grow, and it has become a very tribal and bitter rivalry.

This graphic from Microsoft shows clearly why the console industry is struggling. https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/642...

What is the white on the bottom?

To be fair I had been searching for a non-scalped Series X since release until finally finding one a couple months ago. Stores are continuously sold out, so demand is outpacing supply.

The S is pretty readily available but is less powerful than the previous mid generation upgrade, the Xbox One X. Given that until very recently most games supported both generations there was basically no reason to upgrade from a One X to a Series S

Get it directly from MS?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/collections/xboxseries...

I got a Series X via Best Buy through some Citizens Bank deal in early 2022. Took me an age to get a PS5 tho. Finally got one a few months ago.

I still have not seen a PS5 in real life, ever. These shortages are absurd. Sure I am in my late 30s but I am the ONLY person in my friend group that has managed to pick up a current-gen system.

Here in New England I can pick up one in an hour from Best Buy.

>Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming for me, I don't know how others feel.

Practical computing performance plateaued like 10 years ago, which is why you're feeling unsatisfied. This applies to all markets of computing besides enterprise: Desktops/laptops, consoles, phones/tablets, all of it.

Plenty of people refuse to upgrade from their Sandy Bridges and Skylakes for Windows 11 because they still run everything fine. Plenty of people find smartphone upgrade cycles unjustifiably short because upgrades bring so little in practice.

As I mentioned earlier, the only computing segment still seeing significant leaps in performance to warrant constant and frequent upgrades is the enterprise, most obvious of which is the current "AI" fad.

For me the Apple silicon Macs are a real innovation. The battery life, size and weight is fantastic.

We are at a level of fidelity where huge graphical improvements are not visually that much better than their predeccesors. Diminishing returns because of the limits of human cognition.

No personal hit or anything here, but really looking forward to how badly this will age in 10-15 years.

We shall see. I am by far not the first to say such a thing. And I have been a gamer since the C64 days.

I don't think this is the case. The primary limitation for games is cost of development. Creating content with an order of magnitude more detail is too expensive.

The power of the last two generations of console have allowed developers to make high quality games cheaper. But they are also lazier. We aren't seeing the hyper optimized experiences that fully utilize the hardware like late generation PS2 and PS3. Consider that a PS3 has only 256 Mb of main RAM and 256 on the video card.

This latest generation has been completely dwarfed by the Switch.

Sony tried hard to mismanage too, especially around cross platform play. It's why I was glad I stuck with the Xbox.

As an example, the PSP's UMD format. So much time/effort went into that, while at the same time allowing content to be read from an SD card. Of course I can only assume this was meant as some lame IP protection, and possibly an attempt to bring back a format similar to the once popular minidisc. Also funny to me was that Blu-ray was knock knock knocking already with their Java based programming, while the UMD was programmed much more similarly to HD-DVDs.

It was because Sony had a ton of mini discs laying around since the format didn't take off. The UMD cartridges are just mini discs internally.

what do you mean? there were no recordable UMDs. they all had to be stamped. so having mini discs laying around would serve no purpose

My mistake. I had heard the explanation I gave from a video, but now I've tried to find another source, and I cannot.

Xbox 360 was their biggest success (2005), with 84 million units.

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