Halo Infinite
Credit: microsoft
At this point, it’s all inside baseball. Arguably, the next-gen console war kicked off at the Game Awards in December, when Microsoft’s Phil Spencer strode out on stage to reveal the Xbox Series X, form factor and all. It was a surprising move, and Microsoft has kept up the steady drip of information through a series of announcements that have largely hit the mark, with a recent, underwhelming games showcase standing out as a rare exception. Sony, on the other hand, has been strangely silent: the two main highlights have been a developer-facing GDC presentation and an odd controller reveal. The PS5 got a big boost when Epic showed off Unreal Engine 5 with a demo running on Sony’s machine, but that was neither an actual game nor an actual Sony event.
Does any of it matter?
There’s a wide chasm between the people that follow every development of the video game industry, be it hardware or software, and the millions more that will eventually buy these things. It’s not that these sorts of early announcements and back-and-forth are irrelevant, because you just need to look at the what happened to the Xbox One at announce to see what they can do if mismanaged. It’s that there are other factors at play. Let’s look at PS5 and Xbox Series X on a Google Trends chart:
google trends
Credit: google
This chart is for the past 90 days in the US, which leaves out the Xbox Series X announcement and the only time Microsoft’s console has had more search volume than Sony’s—Sony could never really have a comparable data point, because the Series X name was news where everyone just assumed the PS5 would be called the PS5. The difference is similar, but a little more exaggerated, with a worldwide chart:
google trends
Credit: google
Using Google Trends is an inexact science: it doesn’t show you who is going to buy something, it just provides you a rough framework for how many people are trying to find out more about a thing rather than a different thing. And in this case, it shows that a lot more people are trying to find out about the PS5 than are trying to find out about Xbox Series X, even as Series X has been producing more headlines.
These charts show us that the next-gen console war will be, in a lot of the ways that matter, an extension of the current-gen console war, which Sony won in a landslide. PlayStation is simply the dominant brand in this particular fight, and that means that Sony is operating from a position of relative strength. The fact that backwards compatability will come standard on both machines underscores that point, because most owners of current-gen consoles will be less inclined to switch ecosystems and lose everything they’ve bought over the course of the generation.
Microsoft knows this. It knows that the “console war” in traditional terms is Sony’s game to lose, and that it would take a massive shift to change that. Such a shift isn’t impossible, but planning for it would be a bad idea: it’s one reason, among many, that Microsoft is de-emphasizing this one machine in favor of broader ecosystem, which makes this into a very different ballgame.
Sony knows this too, and it’s likely why it doesn’t seem too worried about matching Microsoft’s announcements blow for blow. It is maintaining a sizable advantage in next-gen sales race, and is using that wiggle room to make its announcements when it’s good and ready: as the Unreal Engine 5 demo showed, the conversation can turn on a dime when even the smallest amount of new information shows up.
For me, this underscores the fact that the next-gen console horse race is, at the end of the day, just one part of what’s becoming a much broader world of gaming. For example, we look at Game Pass and PlayStation Now, which are Microsoft and Sony’s somewhat-competing subscription services. In that area Microsoft is dominating, so let’s go ahead and look at a chart for that:
Google Trends
Credit: Google
There’s no contest here: Game Pass trounces PlayStation Now in terms of search traffic, and real numbers back that up. These subscriptions don’t form the backbone of an industry yet, but they’re also relatively young. It’s possible that we’ll be looking at this chart in 5 years and saying: well, subscriptions are one of the most important parts of gaming, and at this point, it’s Microsoft’s game to lose.
We see similar phenomena elsewhere, too: when we talk about the console wars, we don’t really talk about the Nintendo Switch, because Nintendo is just sort of doing its own thing and the Switch is not seen as direct competition to Microsoft and Sony’s beefy machines. It’s another side of the same story. Even if Sony appears to have won this contest of traditional consoles, there’s room for growth in all sorts of other places.
So yes: Sony is managing to win the console war at this early moment, even without doing anything. That’s unlikely to change when these machines come out, though supply constraints, COVID-19 and economic crises threaten essentially all conventional wisdom. But when we talk about Xbox Series X vs. PlayStation5, we’re only talking about one aspect of the future.
