Its hard to believe that 5 years ago on this very board we all sit around (ok I'm sure not all of us) and we voted on what gaming console we were gonna buy. I had always been a Sony guy since getting my 1st Playstation. And brand loyalty is something I stick by ya know. If the games are good , I'll continue with the brand. So by a big vote (2 to 1 mostly) a lot of us voted to get Playstation 4. Microsoft itself pretty much screwed up at E3 that year in a bad presentation and never seemed to recover from it at launch....and problems continued it seems.

Lets go through the issues...



- As Sony jumped out to a huge lead in 2013 , by 2014 Microsoft decided to drop the price of X-Box One to $350 to try and help spur sales during that holiday season. It did little to help.



- As more time passed Sony would develop more exclusives and let studios get time for them. There was bumps for sure as PS Vita showed us but the main console seemed to be rolling along. In fact here is the list of Playstation Exclusives from 2014 to current folks compared to X-Box.


Sony Playstation

The Order 1886
Uncharted 4 : Thiefs End
Uncharted : Lost Legacy
Bloodborne
Last of Us : Remastered
No Man's Sky
Little Big Planet 3
Abzu
Horizon Zero Dawn
Hellblade
Nier Automata
The Last Guardian
Until Dawn
Ni No Kuni 2 : Revenant Kingdom
Yakuza 6 : Song of Life
Persona 5
Shadow of Colossus
God of War
Detroit Become Human
Spider-Man
Days Gone *
Kingdom Hearts III *


And I'm sure I'm missing some here. But this is the list with Days Gone and Kingdom Hearts III likely hitting in 2019.


Now what about X-Box ?


X-Box


Halo 5
Forza Horizon 2
Quantum Break
Sunset Overdrive
X-Box One : The Masterchief collection
Gears of War 4
Halo Wars 2
Cuphead
Recore
Sea of Thieves
State of Decay 2

I'm sure I'm missing a couple here as well. But get the idea how bad its became for the console.


Anyhow as time passed a number of games that Microsoft announced as big time exclusives were Scalebound , Phantom Dust 2 and Fable Legends were slowly either cancelled or the company closed the studios making the games. In the case of Scalebound it was said Microsoft made a demand of the studio for a certain thing in the game and the developers tried to explain it couldn't happen and they just cancelled the game.

Fable : Legends had the studio suddenly closed outta the blue because Microsoft didn't like how the game was going. It was like the company literally didn't seem to care about these studios or games. Believing they had more coming and why bother. Instead as time passed the exclusives became a trickle.

A fact in a Game Informer last year they brought up how the company had few studios left to create exclusive games while over at Sony there was 20+ studios doing some kind of game in development for them as an exclusive. Also Microsoft's history of heavy handed approach had pushed many to run to Sony to have freedom to create and do games they wanted.


Now finally its been reported that Crackdown 3 will either come out next year (another delay) for Microsoft or they will slowly cancel the game. One rumor was it was gonna be cancelled. This makes Crackdown's 3rd delay now. It also has Microsoft in a position where they have no real exclusives left in 2018 to sell to the buyers.





If lack of exclusives was a problem well 2018 would also show a huge problem in actual quality. Nothing seemed to show this more than watching Microsoft's 2 biggest promoted exclusive games crash and burn critically within weeks of each other. Sony had released God of War to a massive critical and fan reaction. The game has became one of Sony's highest rated games this generation.

Meanwhile X-Box a couple weeks earlier had released Sea of Thieves after promoting it as the big online multiplayer for pirates. The game never did good and fans were bored with it as some complained missions were repetitive. After this a month or two later Microsoft released their next big exclusive that they had spent years promoting "State of Decay 2". This one too had numerous game bugs and had players not happy. It received a 20 gig update patch comically weeks later to fix the bugs in it.



PS4 PRo vs X-Box One X

In 2016 as Microsoft still had very bad sales they made an announcement that they heard Playstation was gonna do a mid-console upgrade to their PS4. Already scared that the Pro could outsell the X-Box One , they decided to do a console upgrade themselves. This time they would up the power of the console and decided to price this update , bigger X-Box system at $499.99 . Sony had marketed their mid-console upgrade at $399.99.

To make it worse , Microsoft debuted this X-Box One X announcement with showing the power of it...with a driving game. Claiming it was a more powerful system than Sony's.




But right now it seems like this war is over. Sony has clearly won and its calculated the console has sold near 80 million units. Meanwhile , X-Box One has done 37 million worldwide. And this is after the big hyped mid-console upgrades. In fact what is scary is Nintendo is expected to sell 20+ million Nintendo Switch consoles by the end of the year and will likely pass X-Box One sales within another year or two.