IDC Analyst: Xbox One Has Lost The Console War Against PS4
The race for hardware sales in this generation of consoles shows the broad advantage that PlayStation 4 has, a console that recently reached 70.6 million units sold. Then comes the Microsoft console, Xbox One, which has not offered full data about the sales of its family of systems for a long time and that will hardly reach the Sony console. It is based on this that Lewis Ward, an analyst at IDC, considered that Xbox has already lost this generation of consoles.
Lewis Ward, an analyst at the IDC firm, revealed to GamingBolt his opinion on the sales of consoles in the current generation and the possibilities that Xbox One has to compete against the dominance of PS4.
In that sense, Ward considered that while the Xbox One offers in terms of games for next year is interesting and Xbox One X has had a favorable response in the market, the Microsoft console will not be able to reach PS4: “Yes, they don’t have much of a choice. I think the exclusive lineup is respectable, at least as far as we can see it into 2018. I’m sure there’ll be some massive Halo title coming to Xbox One in 2018. As far as the broader eighth gen war is concerned, it’s already been lost to Sony. Microsoft will not catch Sony this generation.”
On the other hand, Ward believes that in the face of the unfavorable scenario they face in terms of consoles, Microsoft will focus on the development of Windows 10 as a platform and gaming environment: “The goal now is to make the Windows 10-based gaming ecosystem as large and as profitable as possible. Microsoft’s bigger game is to unify in some important ways their PC and console business on a Win10 platform on the terminal side and on the server side with Azure. They view PCs as a growth opportunity from a gaming angle as well, and that’s very different from Sony, which has more or less gotten out of the PC market.”
Finally, Ward said that in this generation of consoles it only remains to see the sales performance of the improved hardware offer of Sony and Microsoft and that, in this area, it could be a setback by Xbox One X beating PS4 Pro, that would give Xbox an important boost but little significance in general terms.