Xbox Admits Defeat in 'Console Wars' (windowscentral.com) 79
An anonymous reader shares a report: The courtroom showdown between the FTC and Microsoft over the tech company's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard kicked off this morning. First announced in early 2022, the pending transaction has been scrutinized by various global regulatory bodies. Xbox has frantically worked to appease their concerns. While addressing its potentially dominant position, Microsoft lamented its third-place position and admitted defeat in the ongoing "console wars."
Part of Microsoft's current legal strategy is demonstrating the domineering lead PlayStation and Nintendo have established in the gaming industry. Xbox entered the market in 2001, and according to Microsoft's own documentation, their consoles have been outperformed by Nintendo and Sony by a "significant margin." Despite hard-fought success in the Xbox 360 generation and notable financial gain in recent quarters, Xbox claims it's never stopped "losing the console wars." As it stands, Xbox is confidently one of "big three" players in the console market, alongside PlayStation and Nintendo. However, Microsoft states its market share is trailing notably behind the most prominent competition.
Part of Microsoft's current legal strategy is demonstrating the domineering lead PlayStation and Nintendo have established in the gaming industry. Xbox entered the market in 2001, and according to Microsoft's own documentation, their consoles have been outperformed by Nintendo and Sony by a "significant margin." Despite hard-fought success in the Xbox 360 generation and notable financial gain in recent quarters, Xbox claims it's never stopped "losing the console wars." As it stands, Xbox is confidently one of "big three" players in the console market, alongside PlayStation and Nintendo. However, Microsoft states its market share is trailing notably behind the most prominent competition.
Bull ****ing **** (Score:4, Insightful)
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Xbox, Playstation, and... Hmm, there's a third major console maker? Do Switch or other handhelds count? I didn't realize Xbox was behind Playstation, since I hear much more about xbox news.
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Do Switch or other handhelds count?
Considering the Switch can be used as a console yes it counts. Yes it is also a handheld which probably helped it outsell the Xbox One 2 to 1.
I didn't realize Xbox was behind Playstation, since I hear much more about xbox news.
Then you have not been paying attention the last ten years as the Sony has beaten MS since the disastrous Xbox One launch in 2013.
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Some people never use their switch hand-held. Mine is permanently docked.
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Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sold about equal in the end. Xbox 360 got a giant headstart, but the two companies spent an insane amount of money getting 3rd parties to make exclusive content for their consoles. Enough so that MS lost money overall on the 360, and PS3 was so far in the negative that it cancelled out the profits from PS2.
The Xbox One / PS4 generation was more sane, with both companies ramping back spending to more normal levels. PS4 outsold Xbox One something like 4:1.
One of the biggest features
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Switch kinda counts, kinda doesn't. It's selling amazingly, but it's not a direct competition. Most people seem to pick one of PlayStation or Xbox, and then consider a Switch too.
The Switch does not count according to the hardcore console crowd. As a hybrid device, it appeals more an average gamer that can take their games with them if they want. For parents and Nintendos financials, it does count as a console.
Re:Bull ****ing **** (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a defeat.
Of course Microsoft is "admitting defeat". It's playing the wounded animal so it can pretend it's not abusing its operating system monopoly to extend that into a video game monopoly. Unfortunately, our antitrust enforcers think their jobs are protecting abusive monopolies rather than busting them. That this acquisition hasn't just been rubber-stamped like all other large mergers is the real news here.
Microsoft owns, unambiguously, the #1 video game platform ever: Windows. The X-Box series and Windows are, for all intents and purposes, identical: PC's running Windows that host video games. Microsoft's share of the video game platform is somewhere around 95%+, with Sony, Nintendo, and everyone else fighting over the remaining single-digit-percent of the market.
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It's nice to see more console games finally showing up on PC. But the drawback is that Microsoft tries to make Xbox and PC identical. With their "gaming" app called "Xbox" for example (Games For Windows Live was such a massive flop and rage inducer that they needed a new name).
Now, if they start having console style subscriptions or game pass on the PC that's the day I leave a Dark Souls dung-pie on their steps at Redmond.
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They've had GamePass on PC for years.
Making Xbox and PC as close as possible isn't a drawback - it's the only reason you're getting so many of these games ported to PC. Microsoft is making the ports as easy as possible because they know devs won't bother otherwise.
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Do you have any data for that? All I could find was console market share.
Sony 45%
Microsoft 27%
Nintendo 27%
That's globally. Some markets are different, such as Japan where Microsoft is a very distant 3rd place. In fact I think they sell less hardware than Sega and other modern-retro-console manufacturers.
Activision-Blizzard alone is not too dissimilar in size to Nintendo, but doesn't sell hardware.
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95%!? (Score:3)
The X-Box series and Windows are, for all intents and purposes, identical: PC's running Windows that host video games. Microsoft's share of the video game platform is somewhere around 95%+, with Sony, Nintendo, and everyone else fighting over the remaining single-digit-percent of the market.
95%!? That's completely absurd. I agree Microsoft's position in gaming should include Windows but that number is way off.
Going from this https://venturebeat.com/games/... [venturebeat.com]. the pc console breakdown is as follows
"According to the report, there were 1.1 billion PC players and 611 million console players in 2022. The 2.2% decline was mostly due to a 4.2% drop in the console gaming market, as the PC games market increased by 1.8%. Newzoo speculates this could be because of fewer major console releases, as the PC
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Out of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, which company allows you to run the majority of their games on a system built yourself using off-the-shelf commodity hardware? Yeah, I'm playing the PCMR card here. Gaming consoles are the original walled gardens. A Nintendo or Sony exclusive means you're going to be playing it on their respective platforms or not at all.
The home gaming industry has always had vendor lock-in and various other forms of anti-competitive behaviors. The only reason Sony and Nintendo are
Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
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A two-bit corporation that can't stand one bit of competition.
Sounds like a few politicians ...
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Mods: please remove my above comment and this one as they add nothing
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Yes, this is true, but Microsoft saved Apple from Chapter 11:
https://medium.com/cornertechandmarketing/why-microsoft-saved-apple-from-bankruptcy-930f530c18e6
So, without Microsoft, no Apple or that company would be very different if it survived on its own.
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This joke was funny back in the late 90s.
Oooh, a 32 bit shell running on a 16 bit extension of an 8 bit operating system designed for a 4 bit microprocessor by a two bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
Legal Strategy (Score:1)
Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Clickbait's gonna bait....
The lie by omission (Score:5, Insightful)
Their entire model has been moved to "universal software that can easily be made to run both on our console and our increasingly console like desktop system that is in a monopoly position in much of the world". I.e. you can't just pretend it's only xbox console that is going to benefit. It's also the windows gaming machines.
So both xbox consoles and windows computers should be looked at the "microsoft's platform for gaming" when looking if this will harm competition or not.
Re: The lie by omission (Score:2)
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So both xbox consoles and windows computers should be looked at the "microsoft's platform for gaming" when looking if this will harm competition or not.
That just isn't accurate, however. When it comes to gaming, by and large PC and console are two separate markets. This is especially noticeable with a lot of recent game releases. Studios develop for console first, with PC as an afterthought. The fact that we're getting them at all is a good thing, but PC is still clearly a low-priority when it comes to the game studios.
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Red herring. "But they're not investing quite as much into windows PC game side of the game as they do into console one" is simply an admission of "they're investing into both".
Which is why "low priority" is also a lie of omission. You omitted "er" from it. It's a lowER priority. Considering that vast majority of modern games are UE and Unity, with tiny portion remaining being in house engines and Godot, it's less of a "it's a lower priority" and more "what do we optimize menus for", as UE and Unity offer v
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Which is why "low priority" is also a lie of omission. You omitted "er" from it. It's a lowER priority
Don't go putting words in my mouth. I said low, and meant low. It's not a lie of omission. It's just the reality for a lot of those studios. The fact that they're doing anything at all is an improvement, but it's quite clear they're not even trying in a number of the major recent examples. There are a number of studios that, as you say, more or less treat them the same. The menu optimizations being the majority of the concessions for consoles. However, another big one that is overlooked is the camera zoom/a
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Then you are simply wrong or highly unreasonable, because massive income earners are not low priority by any reasonable definition.
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>because massive income earners are not low priority by any reasonable definition.
Are you not aware of the basic fact in gaming industry of today that there are large studios who's budgets are primarily in generating windows ports of the games?
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The people buying expensive GPUs are a very tiny part of the market. Those are high margin, low volume products. You don't design games around those users, you just off them some extra quality settings.
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It's a good thing then that all modern consoles except nintendo ones are just glorified AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs.
To the point where Chinese will literally sell you an aftermarket xbox or playstation motherboard and CPU with working windows 10 running on it.
Which is why most of these games will run just fine without an expensive, or even a cheap GPU. Just get the latest mid range AMD CPU, and GPU comes bolted on that will work just fine for most on low settings.
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Speaking here as someone who does a ton of game ports, any big budget game is designed as a console game. The PC version is 100% an afterthought. It mostly only exists because iterating on PC during development is easier than iterating on consoles.
Getting a build that works on the dev team's setup is pretty easy. Getting a build that works on most people's PCs is a giant pain in the ass, and gets harder the more resource intense the game is.
There isn't massive demand for PC games. Most sales come on console
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So in your estimation, untold millions invested by Epic and Unity technologies into their engines to make them portable between consoles and PCs, as well as someone who purportedly draws a salary from working on said ports are "low priority"?
Just how much money would need to be spent before you would consider it not "low priority"?
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A working and as seamless as possible PC export is a major priority for Unreal et al. because it's a major selling point for their engine. For the end users of the engine, they want a PC build option because it's such a big market, but it's not nearly so big as the consoles so it's lower priority in practice. High priority for starting out, low priority for getting across the finish line.
Just look at the recent examples of PC releases of console games where the PC build has been labelled unplayable due to m
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My point:
>Which is why "low priority" is also a lie of omission. You omitted "er" from it. It's a lowER priority.
>so it's lower priority
We're in agreement.
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They're spending the money on the PC version because it makes development cycles way faster.
If you're using Unity and you change some code, it takes about 30 seconds to recompile the C# code to be able to run in the editor and test it out. To test on a console, you need to do a full build - processing all the assets, running the C# code thru a native code compilation, etc. The games I've been working on lately are around 10 GB for a console build, and they take about 15 minutes to compile on a Ryzen 7950X.
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>The PC support exists primarily because it makes development go way faster. Being able to sell something at the end is a bonus.
"We only sell to some people and leave a lot of revenue and profit on the table" is how business side of company gets fired. And not just fired, but fired in such a way that no one will hire them against for anything business related.
I suspect you're stuck in a bit of a tunnel vision of being an expert at your specific craft, but unable to see outside it to the table where busin
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I suspect you're stuck in a bit of a tunnel vision of being an expert at your specific craft, but unable to see outside it to the table where business decisions are made. Because even in times when PC gaming was far less than today, console gaming was far more than today, and engines didn't have the easy porting between systems because consoles weren't glorified AMD based x64 PCs.
Quite the opposite. I've often got a big say in those decisions. Ports don't happen without the dev team giving their evaluation of how difficult the port will be and what the risks are. If I say a PC port is this is going to be problematic, it almost certainly doesn't happen or gets features cut.
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Then what's your take on relative prevalence of PC ports in era of powerPC xbox 360 PS3, and emotionengine PS?
Because every one of those ports is "problematic" in countless ways. And yet while less plentiful than before, they're still plentiful.
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PowerPC vs x86 is damn near meaningless. The main difference it made was endian issues for your data files. That's pretty trivial tho - usually just means a tiny bit more time spent writing the build tools that process your assets. Other than that, the Xbox 360 was a fairly standard Windows box running DirectX 9. The PS3 was a giant pain in the ass to develop high end games for, but games releasing on just PS3+PC were very rare. PS3 exclusive, PS3/XBox, or PS3/Xbox/PC were all way more common.
And again tho,
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You takes are interesting because you are indeed from the time when PC gaming became so prevalent, and PCs so powerful as a result that it became easier to develop on PCs instead of development kits. Thank you for your insights, it helps me update my knowledge more to the current times.
It's a very refreshing angle for an old timer like me who still remembers things like early attempts to get PC gaming going in super nintendo days, and then PS1 days and PS2 era of emotionengine.
The point I was trying to rais
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There is massive DEMAND for PC games. There isn't massive MONEY in PC games. Most PC games are still, sad to say, pirated. The legitimate sales are generally in the first couple of weeks (which is why Denuvo etc., are only important for
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PC ports are a lower priority purely because of the money factor - you can probably sell twice as many copies on PC, but you aren't making anywhere close to even just equal money, and chances are, if you properly evaluate the market, you probably have 3-4 or more times the players in total on PC.
The vast majority of games sell far less copies on PC than they do on consoles. And they make less per unit. It's really rare for a game to do better on PC unless it's got some key selling point that makes the PC version significantly better.
Piracy is a thing. It's why bigger devs are doing microtransactions and other things - either to try to capture some money from pirates, or make it so pirates have a lesser chance of winning over the legitimate folks (i.e., pay to win, and since the pirates can't, or won't, well..).
Piracy isn't why devs do microtransactions. The average user is price sensitive and won't buy if you base price is too high. Your most dedicated players are often willing to spend significantly though. And every now and then once someone gets hooked on your game, they'r
Software and Consoles are not the same thing..... (Score:3)
Consoles are not gaming companies.
Microsoft is buying a SOFTWARE company. Not a console company.
The Big Lie (Score:4, Insightful)
Starting with Windows 10, decent Windows PCs are able to run XBox games. Properly understood, the XBox One and XBox Series X are just reference devices sold at an affordable price point. The battle is not XBox vs Nintendo vs Playstation, it's Windows vs those players.
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I'd like to know from an actual self built engine developer rather than an unity/unreal user how important xbox similarity to windows PCs is in practice. Because from my outsider perspective it seems like the XSX is a reference implementation of DX12's latest spec - mesh shaders and ray tracing - and legacy pipelines are either not supported or not performant. Whereas on PC you can only use those new things if you also provide fallbacks for the far more common scenario that your users are running considerab
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You must be young. The xbox came to life after microsoft in the late 90s realized that, since the pc became a powerful game platform due to GPUs (and microsofts efforts in guiding that tech to the market), they can put a cheap x86 pc in a box and make it run pc games. Xbox was linked to the pc platform from its inception.
Another mistake you make is thinking that pc sales automatically have a big impact on microsofts profits. Console makers make money by putting a lock on access to content. It's about the in
So doing what they did pre 90s DoJ then (Score:1)
I don't think so (Score:2, Interesting)
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True gamers have a PC
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I wish more games were exclusive, at least for a time. Cross platform games require more staff. With more staff you wind up with more demarcation and less co-operation and you wind up with a core "engine" team who are separate from the "port" team and separate from the game design, etc. In the old days when the Japanese were on top, they wouldn't make engines, they'd make "Ridge Racer" or "Resident Evil" and the programmers would just code whatever was needed however it would be most expedient with nary a t
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Microsoft seems to always intend to become number one in every industry where they arrive late with a mediocre product, then later bemoan how hard it is while defensively claiming they're not a monopoly because they're not number in in their side ventures. Xbox being one of the few things they have in the portfolio that isn't mediocre.
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No one really knows where Microsoft is at. Their hardware sales are way behind Sony and Nintendo, but their model for the past 7 years or so has been to target the people willing to spend a lot on Xbox games / Xbox Live, and not worry about the overall size of the userbase.
And all the numbers are blurry because GamePass is a huge part of their business model.
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This isn't a fucking race.
the console wars(tm) have always been about who's on top.
it's a point of pride, and also revenue.
to the victor goes the spoils (lion's share of software revenue).
if you're in first place, and you're making massive losses [...] then you're a loser.
doesnt happen.
if you're on top, you're making tons of money, unless the whole industry tanks like it did for atari.
however, to your point, you can be in second or third place and be making healthy profits--but it's just not the same as being #1.
a good example is nintendo: they've abandoned the console wars (for now) and are doing just fine.
bu
Losing the console war but raising prices? (Score:3)
Xbox claims it's never stopped "losing the console wars."
What sane company would raise price while losing in the market? https://games.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Wait (Score:2)
Victory=Monopoly? No no no. What a crock.
they don't admit - they deceive (Score:2)
Microsoft wants to have their acquisition of Activision Blizzard approved.
So they must diminish any competition issues - and some of them relate to the console market.
"No concessions are needed - look what a bunch of losers we are..."
it's inconceivable they would use the leverage (Score:3)
But it is inconceivable to think Microsoft would use the Activision Blizzard purchase for anything but a profit stream because their gaming console platform is doing so poorly. It's inconceivable that there'd be any hope of changing that by acquiring a majority of the game developers and then eliminate or limit game releases on the OTHER console platforms.
Poor Microsoft.
LoB
Ironically, this is true (Score:2)
In a twist of the fate, Sony had been playing the hardball business game in the console market space much better than them.
As suggested, Microsoft played very aggressively during the 360 era. They launched one year earlier, and at a lower price. They secured many exclusives, and even started making inroads to the Japanese market. This was a major challenge to the Sony's domain.
But Sony beat them handily, but using a mixture of techniques. At the end of Xbox One era, they basically suffocated Microsoft for c