Has there ever been a more dramatic twelve months in the games business? Yes, we’ve watched as microtransactions invaded console games, Nintendo’s problems mounted, VR returned, alt consoles emerged to challenge the status quo and online communities became ever more powerful, but it is the battle between Sony and Microsoft that was the most thrilling and controversial tale of this year – and perhaps any other in the medium’s history.
It had everything. And appropriately for this time of year, Microsoft spent much of 2013 playing the pantomime villain. A couple of stories from our well-placed sources set the scene: on February 1, we revealed what we knew about PlayStation 4 before anything had been announced or confirmed, and a few days later, we did the same with what was then known as the next Xbox. What we’d learned of PS4 at that point suggested that it was a smart, if hardly revolutionary, next step for Sony, a powerful games console with a more open, social feel. Meanwhile Microsoft’s next console would block second-hand games, require an internet connection and would ship with Kinect, whether you wanted it or not. It wasn’t as powerful as PS4 nor as developer-friendly. Not a great start for Microsoft, then, and the battle for hearts and minds hadn’t even officially begun.
At the PS4 reveal event on February 20, it got worse for Microsoft purely because Sony got so much right. At PlayStation Meeting, Sony’s rhetoric somehow struck a balance between humility and hyperbole, the platform holder pitching PS4 as a console built with developers and players in mind – quite a reversal from its approach with PS3. Perhaps aware of Microsoft’s well-known desire to make its next Xbox the centrepiece of the living room (and with the understanding that it had enough money to buy the exclusives and marketing to do so) Sony knew it had to gain industry and hardcore support at launch or PS4 was doomed. It succeeded.
Meanwhile, Microsoft could not confirm the existence of the console we all knew was coming for months, even after Sony’s unveiling and GDC in March. Sony’s early semi-reveal meant that at the annual creator’s pow-wow, countless developers could talk in loose terms about one next gen console, but had to deny all knowledge of the other. All the while, the rumours got worse and all of the excellent work Microsoft had done with 360 was slowly unravelling. It inspired an editorial from your humble scribeintended to outline the madness of such a long silence – it had become not just ridiculous but damaging to pretend that it didn’t exist – the best thing Microsoft could do was just show it to us, we concluded.
And when Microsoft finally did reveal its next console, it was spectacularly misjudged.
On May 21, the games industry and millions of players watched a livestream of the next Xbox reveal, and afterwards, started to wonder what exactly they’d seen. Microsoft seemed to have pitched it at some fictional segment of players who really wanted their Xbox to be more like an interactive cable box and less like a games console. As we noted afterwards, the questions answered in the Xbox showcase weren’t the ones real people were asking: what does the new console do that my 360 doesn’t? Which new games will I be playing on it? Can I play second-hand games? Will it be backwards compatible?
In the void where facts should have been, confusion reigned in the media, among players and even in executive interviews – in some cases one senior Xbox spokesperson contradicted the other. We were urged to wait until E3 to get the full picture; at that event, Microsoft actually did just fine.
It was only after Sony’s conference that Microsoft’s evasive and unconvincing performance became clear.Our review of Sony’s conference even wondered if Xbox One could recover from such a comprehensive shoeing. Sony seemed to understand its audience perfectly and played to that strength, though it took a good hour to get into its stride. PS4 was easier to understand, sexier, had a ton of games and seemed the better fit for indie developers. It was cheaper. It was the subject of a mischievous, brilliant viral and went on to become the subject of one of the most talked-about Edge covers ever produced.
From February to June and beyond, Sony’s PS4 pitch had a humility and humanity that Microsoft’s slick besuited execs couldn’t beat. Whether it was Mark Cerny on stage or Shuhei Yoshida on Twitter, Sony had well media-trained personalities who seemed to belong to some oddly wholesome videogame family; Microsoft had automatons with side partings like Don Mattrick, who left for Zynga (and an enormous amount of money) soon after introducing the new Xbox. It was his departure, among so many sensational post-E3 developments, which started Xbox One’s redemption.
The platform holder had to act, and act quickly. But even the astonishing policy reversals which followed that fateful E3 seemed to happen in slow motion, half-announced on Twitter, clarified by Major Nelson and then officially confirmed and explained. It was a mess, and it maintained and intensified Microsoft’s torture. It took a while, but Xbox One was slowly being purged of its sins – always-on, that DRM, mandatory Kinect – and when Microsoft finally came out of the other end, we ended up with a very different console. By Gamescom in August, we had a leaner contender with a hastily-assembled indie program, ID@Xbox, and a fairer fight.
What has become clear about the power of community throughout is that once players get their way, all is (almost) forgotten. The real trick is to work out what they want and deliver that before dreaming of some distant future in which games consoles displace set-top boxes. Actually, as PS4′s reception has proved, what players wanted wasn’t a giant leap forward into an always-on, always connected world, nor was anyone ready to sacrifice their rights to physical game ownership in exchange for some half-explained cloud future. Microsoft might even have been guilty of being too honest, in fact; it would have been wiser to keep quiet about its burning desire to ‘own the living room’ and concentrate on a simpler goal – ensuring that as many 360 owners as possible upgrade to Xbox One rather than switch allegiances to PS4. It didn’t, and it paid the price.
Though it was difficult to imagine after the scale of PlayStation’s triumph at E3, we end the year with Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles apparently almost neck-and-neck. 2.1 million PS4s had been sold by December 3, said Sony recently, and Xbox One had sold two million when Microsoft went public with its hardware sales on December 11, having launched in far fewer territories.
Right now, PS4 remains the connoisseur’s choice. It is the more powerful box, its social features are neat and accessible, and its launch titles are solid, if not truly essential. Its PlayStation Plus service remains excellent, and let’s not forget how handsome Sony’s console is in the flesh. PS4 has won the battle in 2013 – just – but Microsoft’s console might yet win the war.
Just as Sony’s hubristic PS3 launch had damaged its prospects early on, Microsoft’s troubles in 2013 will soon fade from memory. At least it had the good sense to change its approach to Xbox One before it launched, rather than battling on and hoping for the best as Sony once did. In a few years, when those pre-launch press conferences and disc-based games seem quaint, perhaps it’ll be Microsoft’s console which turns out to be the superior multimedia box. It certainly has the stronger ambitions in that regard, and the finances to achieve that long-held dream. Sony will look to broaden its messaging around PS4 soon enough, but throughout it all, Xbox has just about retained its hold over the US market, one which will ultimately decide the victor this generation.
For now, at the end of an unforgettable year, it’s almost a relief to have millions of new gameboxes out in the wild. Certainly, Microsoft will be delighted that the conversations around these new consoles have moved on from policies to the games themselves. 2014 will bring us plenty of those, and from this point onwards Sony and Microsoft’s battle takes on a different tone. The next twelve months will bring us something more tangible than press conferences and product positioning – proper next-gen games – but the coming year will never be able to top the drama and controversy of an explosive 2013.
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