In a recent Game Informer interview with Xbox head Phil Spencer, the outspoken exec had some interesting remarks about Sony, the Xbox One, and the console war in general. Spencer noted that despite PS4’s substantial head start, he still intends for Microsoft to “win” the current console war in the end.
At some level, it is a competition, and I’ve said before I want to win. At the same time, I want to build a great platform for gamers. If somebody else does that too, and they do really well? Hats off to them, but I can have success in our own space if we’re selling a lot of consoles and people are buying games.
Hold on a minute. Why does Phil place winning and building a great platform on two separate “hands?” Are they mutually exclusive? It may be a slip of the tongue, but I find the phrasing extremely odd. Regardless, Spencer clearly doesn’t want PS4 to outright fail either. Competition is healthy, he’d just prefer Microsoft sell more boxes than Sony.
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We shipped at the same time and we’re in direct competition with the PS4. I’m not going to duck that. I want to win. I want to win this generation, but I want to win more than I want the other guy to lose. I own a PS4, and it’s not like I want it to get dusty or not have games. But I do want to sell a lot of Xbox Ones, and for many people that’s a direct competition with the PS4. As the Xbox team, we are the underdog.
They beat us in June. They beat us in May. These months are small if you look at the sales. I think the whole month of June is about one week in November. They’re winning, and they’ll do their PR around it, and that makes sense. The battle is really September, October, November, and December.
Points well made, Phil, but catching up with Sony’s 10 million PlayStation 4s won’t be easy. Heck, Xbox One still needs to catch the Wii U first! According to publicly available sales numbers, anyway.
