Out of all the famous product battles throughout history, few are as fierce as video game console wars. Sony launched the PS4 last Friday, and Microsoft’s Xbox One is coming out swinging at the end of the week. As far as console battles have gone, this one has been particularly vicious, with Sony making numerous explicit jabs at the Xbox One with both advertisements and during their press conference at e3 last May. you can watch an ad mocking the Xbox One’s complicated game sharing system here (Xbox has since changed this system to simply being able to give your game disks to friends to share them).
However, Sony has merely been capitalizing on the numerous mistakes that Microsoft has made along the way. From the moment the Xbox One was officially announced, the company has done a terrible job of properly explaining the new features of the console. For example, instead of demonstrating how the Xbox One would essentially operate like Steam (which is incredibly well-loved by gamers), they talked about how games were mandatory to install and would be region-locked. Microsoft’s PR essentially focused on all the “cannots”, while ignoring the “cans.”
As a result of this, Microsoft has faced a huge backlash against the Xbox One and many of its innovative features. this caused the company to back-pedal and retract many of it’s previously stated policies and features, settling for a system much more similar to Sony’s PS4. However, despite this change in direction, many gamers have lost faith in Microsoft and are “converting to the enemy team.”
Microsoft has learned first-hand that it is easy to destroy a brand’s reputation, but very difficult to repair it. While they’ve put their best efforts into restoring gamers’ confidence in their product, they still have a long ways to go to stand on even ground with Sony once more. And the road is all uphill, as Sony clearly isn’t letting it’s newly dominant position go to waste.