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Report: PS4 Is Selling Twice As Well As Xbox One (arstechnica.com)
The latest numbers released by analysts suggest that the Sony PlayStation 4 is selling twice as many units worldwide as the Xbox One since both systems launched in late 2013. The data comes from a new SuperData report on the Nintendo Switch, which is backed up by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. SuperData mentions an installed base of 26 million Xbox One units and 55 million PS4 units. Ars Technica reports: Ahmad's chart suggests that Microsoft may have sold slightly more than half of the 53.4 million PS4 units that Sony recently announced it had sold through January 1. Specific numbers aside, though, it's clear Microsoft has done little to close its console sales gap with Sony over the past year -- and may have actually lost ground in that time. The last time we did our own estimate of worldwide console sales, through the end of 2015, we showed the Xbox One with about 57 percent as many systems sold as the PS4 (21.49 million vs. 37.7 million). That lines up broadly with numbers leaked by EA at the time, which suggest the Xbox One had sold about 52.9 percent as well as the PS4 (19 million vs. 35.9 million). One year later, that ratio has dipped to just above or even a bit below 50 percent, according to these reports. The relative sales performance of the Xbox One and PS4 doesn't say anything direct about the health or quality of those platforms, of course. Microsoft doesn't seem to be in any danger of abandoning the Xbox One platform any time soon and has, in fact, recently committed to upgrading it via Project Scorpio later this year. The gap between PS4 and Xbox One sales becomes important only if it becomes so big that publishers start to consider the Xbox One market as a minor afterthought that can be safely ignored for everything but niche games.
Both are viable platforms with lots of games and players. Who cares if one is twice the size of the other?
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
For those not up on computer history, Osborne was a computer maker that announced a great new model coming in a year... so sales started tanking while people waited... which meant there was no model in a year (or maybe there was, my memory is fuzzy on that detail).
I think MS was really dumb to try and compete with the PS4 Pro by saying they would have improved hardware next year. All they had to do was literally nothing, the PS4 Pro is not big enough of a bump that it would have effected XBox sales...
Although really it seems like XBox sales have been lagging even before the recent hardware upgrade was announced.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Scorpio, an upgraded Xbox One, is said to have about 3x the power of the PS4, 1.5x the power of the PS4 Pro. And 5x the power of the Xbox One, which it has to be compatible with. Scorpio software must run adequately on the Xbox One despite the huge power gap.
This is a premium system with a rumored high price tag, launching about 2 years before the expected next generation of consoles debuts.
Having to compete with the installed base of PS4 and Xbox One so late in the game, developer focus is expected to reflect this, leading to only minor updates to games such as higher resolution, framerate, and anti aliasing. Not expected are more complex models, more detailed worlds, significant shader and texture differences, increased complexity in physics models, or AI differences (especially since Scorpio gamers are expected to match with Xbox One gamers online, and the games are supposed to remain basically the same, only superficially different).
Bottom line is they expect knowledgable gamers (casuals won't care about this) to pay a high price for minor cosmetic differences not long before newer powerful machines come out that aren't resterained by compatibility with older less powerful systems. It doesn't seem like this will do much to bolster the Xbox brand, and may even make adopters upset. Probably only Microsoft's own titles will bother to put the resources behind making any significant improvements to games, especially considering how much games already cost, and how much testing will have to be done specifically for a significantly different version, and that's only 2-3 games a year?
It does not seem like Scorpio will help MS....
Twinstiq, game news
They sell twice as many consoles but have about 1/5 the amount of games as Xbox. This is what happens when people get too dependent on DirectX when OpenGL is soooo much better and available to everyone.
But the Playstation doesn't use OpenGL anyway, one advantage of those high level APIs is they allow abstraction of a vast range of hardware with a cost of overhead for doing so. The Playstation does not have a range of graphics hardware so suffering that overhead would be pointless, they use their own low-level graphics API.
Scorpio software will be hamstrung by mandatory compatibility with Xbox One hardware. http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
Scorpio's higher price will slow adoption, developers will still focus on the much larger install base of PS4 and Xbox One onwers, meaning developer resources won't be put into significant enhancements for Scorpio compatible games. http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
Scorpio's hardware will be outclassed 2 years later when the PS5 is released. http://www.gamezone.com/news/a...
It will be an expensive flop, not a good way to start a new generation.
Twinstiq, game news
I am quite curious if Sony is now the leading manufacturer of consumer electronics powered by FreeBSD. The only other manufacturer that I think may be in the running would be Panasonic, with FreeBSD as the basis for their televisions.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Switch is competing for game developers with the Xbox and PS, Nintendo has struggled massively with 3rd party support previously and it doesn't look like that will change much. There architecture is massively different and that makes them much more expensive to develop for. Xbox and PS are similar with a combined userbase of more than 80 million. Switch isn't destined for disaster but it has a lot of work ahead to be successful as apart from the gimmicky Wii Nintendo have been in a userbase slide for a long time now.
But the Playstation does have a range of hardware with the release of the PS Pro.
Yes, a range of 2, just like the XBox One and Project Scorpio. And it is forward compatible meaning that you can develop for the PS4 and it works just as good on the PS4 Pro, you only need to put in additional effort if you want create a unique experience on the PS4 Pro.
MS will have the advantage here as the DirectX API originating from the PC was designed from the start to easily develop for a range of hardware. It will be significantly easier for developers to take advantage of the extra power in Project Scorpio then it is for the PS Pro
Well given the assumption that Project Scorpio will be backwards compatible with the XBox One what is a specific example of something that will be so much easier to do with DirectX on Project Scorpio to create a unique experience that will be difficult to do on the PS4 Pro with PSGL?
Microsoft unrolled a plan that put major roadblocks up to trading or selling used games. Consumers told them to go fuck themselves. ...fast forward...
Sales are 2 to 1, in favor of the company that didn't try to pull this blatantly anti-consumerist bullshit, and rightfully so. Apparently, plenty of idiots were swayed by their last minute reversals.
AAA titles are not developed for ARM. I cannot think of any game with more than $10MM in dev. costs that was for an ARM platform.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The issue isn't "studio has ARM experience", its "how many hours does it take to port from the initial configuration to ARM" Because a AAA product will be designed first for Xbox/PS4/Computers.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
They [...] have about 1/5 the amount of games as Xbox
It's the other way around, a lot of indie and not so indie titles (mainly Japanese stuff, but also games like Tropico 5) are out on PS4, but not on Xbone.
It's not circular logic - ports of AAA products won't be designed for ARM because the current AAA products aren't designed for ARM. New AAA products won't be designed for ARM, because ARM doesn't have a history of AAA products that you can point to to demonstrate to the money people that AAA titles are worth it on ARM
Handhelds. Not AAA domain.
You really overestimate the "write once, run everywhere" nature of game engines.
It will be the easiest... because all AAA titles will be ported from XBox (x86) to PS4 (x86) to PC (x86). All indie games will be published across all platforms that they can push to.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The ps4 pro has the exact same Cpu as the ps4 just clocked considerably higher, and is has the exact same gpu too, just with twice as many compute units and again clocked higher. The hardware is very closely related, optimisations on one can directly carry over to the other. Also ps4 supports directx if devs choose to go that way.
The XBone launch was a disaster. They had to backpedal on just about any announcement made, having sold countless lock-ins as "features", type A Microsoft style. It's only for about a year now that people can trust the XBone to be reasonably fair to the consumer in most areas. And this is the stage of a console lifetime were those interested will go and ask around which console was better marketshare and is likely to have more people playing on- and offline. Hence even potential XBone buyers are craning their necks for the PS4s offerings.
I own the last iteration of the Xbox 360 and a stack of games, most of which would run on the XBone, and even I am reluctant of the XBone, due to the lock-in and lack of convenience in this generations consoles.
Consoles are too much of an online service extension and not really that convenient anymore these days. Pop in a disk, run a game used to be. Now it's download the update of Mafia 3 for 4 days flat until you can actually play. People who have no problem with that get a PC. XBones+Kinect "allways-on" non-sense and similar stuff was just the straw that broke the camels back, vis-a-vis the (slightly) less invasive and pretentious Sony and their PS4.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca