The article is basically about a concern regarding the new closer relationship between Sony's music, movies and gaming departements, how Playstation moves away from being focused on just games.
The only way I could see closer integration of different departments being bad is if Sony went completely galaxy brain and went: No Spotify, No Twitch, No Amazon Video, use our services or tough luck. I seriously doubt that they will do it because they have usage statistics for the PS4.
That would still be better than nothing at all except games as far as I see it. If people don't want to listen to music or see movies through the console then just don't do that. Integrating more entertainmente to the console is a 100% bs concern tbh as long as it doesn't affect the game output, and why would it do that? :P
I don't know. This is my point. We keep hearing about Sony's mistakes that would make them losing next gen ,when they keep selling millions more console than Microsoft...
Ah I see your point now.
Thats true, but we can also flip it and say that Microsoft and Nintendo were really unlucky that Sony came out with a more attractive product than what they had to offer. This would show that one of the system manufacturer were able to make a system that most people wanted to buy, compared to what the competitors offered. So its not really just about being lucky. They were able to be successful because they put a lot of work into making a product that people wanted to buy. Its true that its some luck based though, since the system manufacturers doesnt know how the market will react to their product before it lauches. But that applies to all systems.
And they still sold millions more consoles that Microsoft. Most of the people don't care about BC, most of the people don't care about crossplay, most of the people don't care about Gamepass. And let's be real, most of the people in most the countries don't care about Xbox (outside of the US, sales are something like 65M vs 17M)
Dunno about Nintendo, but Microsoft changed strategy halfway through with the Kinect giving Sony the chance to recover (in the PS360 generation) and they decided to push that strategy in this console cycle as well with even more dumb stuff. They had plenty of signs that they where screwing up and willfully chose to ignore these signs. I agree it does take some luck to anticipate where the market is going, but Microsoft was willfully ignoring what the market was telling them.
This "Sony wins by default" line of thinking is just naive.
Kinect is the reason why Microsoft tied with Sony with consoles sold last gen. Microsoft saw it's best years with Kinect and that's why they pushed it so hard with the Xbox One. The problem is the Kinect audience is not the one to most likely buy a brand new console day one.
I don't think they'll lose, PS brand is too big now, but I absolutely think they need to be aggressive. MS will do anything in their power to get the loud enthusiast minority to talk about the power of XB2 on every social network there is, Sony need to avoid all performance and feature traps so MS don't get the upperhand on the PR. And people are clearly vocal about the pro-consumer and anti-consumer things now so they need to get a new snowball rolling in the right direction there too I think.
Yet, the PS3 had it's best years and was outselling the XBOX 360 during that time. It's all relative. XBOX 360 lost it's dominance and eventually it's lead during the Kinect period.
I do think BC will be significantly easier to implement for MS than Sony. Xbox one is made for directx 12 from the ground up, guess what dx12 is still around. Its successor will be too. PS4 is using a custom Sony API, Vulcan wasn't around when PS4 was developed. This is also the reason the pro gpu is basically two ps4 gpus duck taped together, and the X is entirely new.
