I live in Poland (that round country at the east border of Germany ;)) and in last gen my console gamer friends were splitted 50/50 between PS3 and 360. This time Microsoft really failed with starting their new console:
- Their lack of understanding of gamers…
- …led to this PR disaster (drm) at the beginning…
- …and designing hardware with less efficient (than PS4) GPU…
- …and to forcing more expensive Xbox One being bundled with Kinect which…
- …led to delay in several european countries, as they had to make Kinect work with several “strange” languages…
- …which isn’t (and probably will never be) done, while PS4 became THE next gen console for majority of players.
There were lot’s of mistakes made in the past. What about the future? Xbox division has to flex it’s muscles (with price reduction and aggresive marketing campaigns) to make Xbox somewhere near 1:1 with PS4 in USA. In Europe ratio is somewhere between 1:2 to 1:3 (or actually lower) depending on country. In Poland I see Xbox commercials all the time and local -Yoink!- division seems to do what they can (e.g. not only prices of hardware, but prices of digital content are slightly lesser than these of PS4 - like if they were calculated from $ instead of euro), but effects are nowhere to be seen. More than a half of my PSN friends are playing on PS4, while only one XBL friend have bought Xbox One. Even those of my friends who where 360 users, are buying PS4 instead of Xbox One. Monopoly of PS4 seems to be already established.
With coming of Halo 5 I see -Yoink!-/343i is doing what they can. It’s like they want to please everyone from fiction fans (comeback of blue team or Buck) to competitive players (sticking to 4v4 arena multiplayer). If not of this mess with split screen (or rather lack of it), I’d say here’s coming perfect Halo game. There will be also new Gears of War announced (GoW was always much more popular in my country than Halo) so if not now, then Xbox One will never catch up.
So, will it? Without wishful thinking, seriously, will Halo 5 and GoW be enough, when all these Forzas, Titanfalls, Sunset Overdrives, Master Chief Collections etc. failed to change perception of Xbox One, as a worse console?
