If XB1 can come up with some truly innovative Kinect titles, they might be able to make up the difference. But as far as I can tell, the games we're seeing are mostly multi-platform and don't have really anything substantial in way of Kinect integration.
What is Kinect's killer ap? If they were betting everything on the Kinect, you would think that they would have something. (e.g. Wii Sports sold the Wii controller.)
There is a lot of noise being made about the used games thing. The same thing happened on PC with steam and all the PC games consumers seem to be doing just fine. MS is just making the first step into games going completely digital.
I would love to see steam introduce a family account the way MS have. As my kids get older playing one game locking out all my other games will be frustrating.
There hasn't been a PC used game market since long before Steam came around. That battle was already lost.
But it's not actually the same thing. Steam doesn't phone home every single day in offline mode, has huge, regular discounts on pretty nearly everything, and oh yeah, isn't the only source of games on PC, with plenty of the other sources not having any such restrictions at all.
PS3 was also $200 more than the Xbox 360, launched substantially later with a crazy sparse lineup of titles, agonizingly long installs on everything, had a whole thing where they gradually retracted the backwards compatibility (which won no friends), etc etc etc. Basically a whole series of foot-in-mouth incidents....kinda like Microsoft so far this generation.
It doesn't really, though, because you'll be expected to pay just as much if not more for multiplayer on the Xbox One.
"spending more than they intend"? That's the definition of "marketing"
I don't think Sony is saying "the customer is always right". More like they saw MS's Idiot Announcements #1-20 and declaring "We don't do 17 or 18!"
but if steam goes unexpectedly offline steam still locks you out of your games because you have to be online to put it into offline mode.
The huge regular discounts are nice, is there a reason MS could not attempt to do the same thing? I think part of the reason those sales come about is the flexibility of being digital.
Sure steam is not the only source of games, it is the primary source of choice on PC. So given a choice between steam and it's DRM or other delivery systems PC gamers choose steam. The other sources are significant though. Steam has to keep improving to stay the best. The PS4 could provide a similar drive for the XB1 but who knows.
I think MS wants to go digital an these policies are a push towards that. I think if they execute on a digital marketplace better than sony they could end up with a better system. Conversely if they do not they could hemorrhage users.