PS4 vs Xbox One: "Sony f**king nailed it, and they deserve the victory," says Unity boss
The PS4 vs Xbox One console war is looking more and more like a one horse race. Unity CEO John Riccitiello says Sony has earned this victory.
Speaking at the GamesBeat Summit, as reported by VentureBeat, Riccitiello said Microsoft shot itself in the foot by not putting gamers first, allowing Sony an easy win.
“There was a clash of ideas that really separated Sony and Microsoft. They actually had very similar architecture that they were trying to bring to the table," he said.
"But Microsoft focused a lot on entertainment beyond gaming. Microsoft was trying to [compete against] Apple. They didn’t feel gaming was big enough to justify the pent-up desire to have the recognition they wanted as an innovator.”
Meanwhile, Sony doubled down on games and gamers.
"Sony focused on the shot they needed to make, which was win the hearts and minds of the gamer."
“Sony just said, ‘We’ve made the best f**king game system we could’ - partly because they didn’t have the resources to do more about it,” Riccitiello said.
“Microsoft was focused on the shot after the one they needed to make, putting the seven ball in the corner pocket, but they missed the first shot and didn’t get another shot after it. Sony focused on the shot they needed to make, which was win the hearts and minds of the gamer.
"The broader scope of entertainment might be a bigger idea, but not with an unfocused execution. A tight execution on the 50 million people that matter, which are the people currently lapping up consoles.
"Sony f**king nailed it, and they deserve the victory.”
Although it's far too early to call this generation (remember the PS3 and Xbox 360 finished neck-and-neck despite Microsoft's early dominance), the PS4 has outsold the Xbox One in the US for all but two of the 28 NPD-tracked months the two have been on sale. The PS4 had shipped 22.3 million units by March 31 2015, while we haven't had an Xbox One sales update since "almost" shipping 10 million in November 2014. Heck, Ubisoft seems to have gone cold on the console.
It's a grim start for Microsoft, and one it will need to work hard to reverse. I wouldn't like to be whoever is replacing Phil Harrison.
Riccitiello has a lot of interesting things to say elsewhere in the piece, including a damning appraisal of innovation - or rather, the lack of it - in games since the late 1990's; acknowledgement of the clone-heavy state of mobile charts; and a discussion on the hopefully inevitably decreasing cost of high-end gaming PCs.