The head start argument is nonsense. Microsoft getting into consoles was huge, just like Sony doing it years earlier (with, you know, being a fair few years behind too). These are massively known companies around the world. Coupled with the shear money they can and have thrown at this, nah that's not correct at all.
Anyway, there are a number of reasons XBox are behind. From the start they appealed largely to the US audience games wise, the European market was still a lot more similar to the Japanese one and the variation of games are what drove (and in many ways still do) Sony's dominance. Whilst that stands true still today, the gap there is closing and that's largely due to the likes of COD and Fortnite making Console shooters more viable than ever, coupled with the timing of the Gamepass and Xbox gamers beginning to slowly get more variety. Whether that will be true of the big hitter exclusives though, well that very much remains to be seen.
The biggest factor though is still the handling of the Xboner era. And not just for gamers too. Riding on the wave of a steady increase in popularity especially after the 360 years (I don't know if those threads still exist, but they were even more interesting to read than the boner/4 ones to see what we got right and what we didn't...the 360 coming out on top in terms of all round gaming whilst Weaste, Elvis and pretty much everyone else laughing at me saying it was one
), the decisions around it were indeed poor. It's the promises both to gamers but especially to developers and publishers that really did damage, damage they are still trying to recover from. As I discussed at the time, well ahead of launch, the way MS treated (and still do to some degree) it's partner teams made some horrible places to work, but it was the handling of Kinect 2.0 that really pissed a lot off. I could go on and on about all this, but we've been there and done that, the short of it is they still need to earn that trust back. So far it's been a lot of talk, but that's no different to last time.
Now that all being said, there's definitely a lot going for them this time around. The machines, although still under featured (thanks to AMD fecking up, but that's a whole other topic), are very well built this time. The X in particular shits all over the PS5 for form and function. Also, the way they are cutting back on putting fat idiot suits with no experience of gaming into producer roles has really changed the way teams are able to work. Again I've spoke a lot about the past Rare situation on here, but one of the key reasons I cite Sea of Thieves as the best thing on the gamepass (unless Alock wants to bring up metacritic reviews from 3 fecking years ago again
) is that since being allowed and supported to continue to build the game, MS have shown they can fix the two biggest problems which as said above are variety and teams being left and happy to create. If only they did that with Spark.
Thankfully, our resident tea boy isn't actually involved in anything to do with them, as with his negative nelly ways they'd never climb up. The people in charge though do think they can close the gap and do want to sell machines, they've just figured out a better way to do that whilst finally acknowledging their biggest flaws. Again whether they fully fix them and it's not a lot of talk and bluster remains to be seen, the Bethseda deal for example is no indication of that alone and it will take a lot of time for the true changes to be made, but one thing I do know is that developers are definitely more comfortable with them again which is only good for us.
