Xbox One X vs PS4 Pro: The Great Cerny Bakeoff
You can’t ICE a cake if you don’t HAVE a cake.
Placeholder image. Does Mark Cerny even wear a yellow jacket?
PS4 launched alongside Xbox One in 2013.
PS4 was cheaper and more powerful. Xbox One was more expensive but less powerful.
Not surprisingly, PS4 gained the most traction out of the gate for having the greatest cost to performance ratio. Great value for the players.
PS4 ran games at a higher resolution than Xbox One which struggled with 1080p on nearly all games so games tended to be 720p or later 900p. Inferior performance but sold to fans for more money turned out to be a huge mistake for the console back then and the entire Xbox brand now.
Who wants to pay more money for something worse? Only the hardcore Xbox fans it turned out, and a few million consumers who were misled, in my opinion.
Early adopters paid through the nose
An Xbox One Day One Edition was $499. PS4 at launch was $399, but with more powerful hardware. In fact PS4 was the first games console to use GDDR5 RAM, an unthinkable spec when PS4 rumours first did the rounds in 2012, and 8GB too, that’s 16 times more RAM in the PS4 than PS3, and a lot faster.
PIC TWEETS OF GDDR5 RUMOUR REACTIONS
PS4′s superior specs, with the added benefit of being lower priced was nothing short of genius from Sony. In my opinion one of their smartest decisions since the PS2 in the 90′s and the Sony Walkman in the 80s.
This was all thanks in part to Sony’s external consultant System Architect, Mark Cerny an American computer gaming legend who resides in Japan. Cerny being responsible for the recent KNACK 2, and major work on a “few games” you may've heard of over the years. Here's a few listed to buy any of them:
Photo: Mark Cerny & Hideo Kojima
Xbox One’s PR and marketing hype leading up to the first Xbox One was a joke, actually it was comedy gold. They were all over the place hyping everything but gaming itself; officially announcing that the Xbox One would be “the next water cooler”.
“You and your TV are about to have a relationship”
...was possibly the most truthful statement they made ever. LOL
“TV”, “sports” were announced repeatedly during their reveal event, but games were hardly mentioned.
In contrast, PlayStation’s announcement event was first and foremost all about gaming...
But Xbox One whiffed of a really bad smell early on even before launch amongst the the most vocal gaming communities due to Xbox’s plans to use DRM (Digital Rights Management) to effectively lock existing used physical games behind a pay wall. You’d need to pay Xbox if you wanted to use your friend’s disc version of a game and they could set whatever price they like depending on demand.
This approach pretty much threatened console gaming as whole, it sent shockwaves across social media and threatened to shut down pretty much the entire physical used games market. Trying to charge gamers money to use old game discs that had already been paid for was the lowest I’ve seen Xbox go.
Discussions on twitter quickly descended to people defending Xbox says “It’s the way technology is advancing.” Then others trying to explain to them the concept using used car analogies.
In hindsight we’re safe, but at the time it felt like Xbox moving in this radical direction would possibly force the hand of PlayStation & Nintendo to follow suit,
Sony responded.. and here’s the reaction from fans when they announced it...
It was a disgusting attempt by Xbox, massively anti-consumer. But that wasn’t all. Xbox One would also require the console to be “always online” in order to even be used, meaning millions of gamers who are very happy playing games at home offline (without an internet connection) simply could not play games on Xbox One.
This of course included US Armed Forces service men and women, many who were already hardcore Xbox 360 fans for AAA blockbuster tentpole FPS games such as Call of Duty. They couldn't all upgrade from 360 to Xbox One if it required always online access and online check ins.
Xbox’s America-focussed approach was certainly at odds here, the idea of always online was ridiculously impractical.
“Hold the sat higher out the top so we can use Xbox for another 24hrs offline”
Thankfully after a long onslaught of social media pressure mainly from PlayStation fans who were also concerned about the Xbox platform going downhill and the potential for it to spread across other console platforms too, Xbox decided to U-turn on their DRM used games plans and always online was phased out.
This U-turn (or 180), was likely as a combined result of the DRM revolt that made waves through he gaming industry but mainly i think, Xbox’s lacklustre Xbox One sales numbers.
MANABYTE ASTROTURFING PIC
There was also speculation that Xbox were creating fake positive reviews on Amazon and “an army of thousands social marketers” were busy burying negative comments by customers on twitter. Other rumours included Xbox buying back their own consoles from stores stock to artificially inflate sales numbers and to add to sales hype.
It all failed. 3rd party publishers flocked to PS4. Sales of PS4 were already outpacing Xbox One at launch and most sensible gamers knew which brand was trying to bullshit them.
Photo: Xbox One was unboxed by Xbox’s Major Nelson in 2013 and a “4K” HDMI cable was mentioned to confuse consumers into feeling the machine may be 4K. It wasn’t.
But good guy Sony was just getting started, 3rd party games were selling well and Sony 1st party games (games only available to play on the PlayStation platform) were busy in production pipeline for later down the road.
(I’ll get to the cake and icing thing again soon!)
So...fast forward 4 years to the present day, 2017:
Hideo Kojima is working on ‘Death Stranding’, a PlayStation exclusive with Guillermo del Toro, Mads Mikkelsen and Norman Reedus. Call of Duty by Activision has had PlayStation as their main marketing partner for years. Destiny too. Amazing considering Xbox had this mostly under their control last gen with the Xbox 360.
Loads of 3rd party Japanese-centric games that hark back to PlayStation 2′s glory days are constantly coming out on PS4, not on Xbox. Xbox are cancelling 3rd party games during production.
Xbox has sold under half the amount that PS4 continues to globally, it’s got so bad that Xbox non longer publish their unit sale numbers.
I’m actually shocked to see that Xbox are making the (fatal?) move of winding down their 1st party game development output, meaning less 1st party exclusives and less reason to buy an Xbox One console. This is a lot like giving up.
Meanwhile Sony has ramped up work via their worldwide studios and are developing a killer slate of exclusive games ‘Only on PlayStation’, an almost non-stop conveyor belt of critically acclaimed bangers, all landing at different times throughout the year like, sometimes scatter bombed without any warning or hype. Solid and known upcoming games that have huge fan anticipation attached to them are always in sight on the horizon a few years down the line.
Xbox has lost their 3rd party VIP relationship status they had built up with the big publishers during the xbox 360 era. 3rd party developers and publishers are all about the PS4 now, and lately the Nintendo Switch too. Xbox One, not so much.
Nintendo Switch is also selling more than Xbox did at launch, even though most Xbox fans said RIP to Nintendo after the Wii U flopped and before that dismissed the whole of Nintendo as “for kids”.
So, back to the original cake and icing analogy...
The cake is the console’s reputation, the massive number of happy fans, the trust, the success, the global sales, the 3rd party support, the industry recognition and appreciation and all the confidence and faith fans have in the future of that console platform.
So What’s the icing? = Resolution.
PS4 Pro (a footnote to this article really) was quietly added as an option by Sony in 2016 with minimal fanfare, it’s main purpose was to offer existing hardcore PS4 fans an upgrade path to play PS4 games on their new UHD 4K TVs (3840 x 2160) or at a higher fidelity on HD TVs (1920 x 1080). PS4 pro launched at exactly the same price in 2016 as the original PS4 did in 2013.
PS4 Pro is now outselling the PS4 on a daily basis alot of the time.
So... in response how did Xbox react to PS4 Pro?
They hyped a more powerful “Monster” Xbox with “No Compromises” and a codename of: PROJECT SCORPIO. See the promo vid below.
Project Scorpio was official named ‘Xbox One X’ it launches in October 2017.
It costs MORE than PS4 Pro. It costs more than PS4, Xbox One, Xbox One S and Nintendo Switch.
Generally speaking, Xbox One X will likely run 3rd party games at a slightly higher quality than the same games on PS4 Pro (though that’s constantly open for debate, a niche that Digital Foundry have capitalise on well).
But for Xbox, the specs of X is the “icing” on their cake.
But it has no exclusive games variety. It has hardy any real value. It has half the fanbase of PlayStation, most of the Xbox 360 fanbase have moved to PlayStation. But most of all, I don’t believe them anymore. They’ve lied way too much.
Xbox in 2017 has NO CAKE! It’s all icing.
For Xbox, there’s hardly any left. And it’s either dry or half baked and being hyped by crumbside bots.
PS4 Pro and Xbox One X games wilTherefore Xbox One X will likely flop.
Industry analyst Michael Pachter says it will likely sell a few million. But nothing close to Xbox’s misleading hype saying it’s “the fastest selling Xbox console ever” based on....pre-orders.
For contex, preorders weren’t even a thing when Xbox 360 was launched, so the statement being peddled by about 4 Xbox execs over twitter to millions of fans, is utter spin.
For even more context, Xbox execs aimed for a nutjob 1 BILLION sales for the original Xbox One. LOL.
