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A lot of people are going to be considering buying a new gaming machine in the coming months. Some of them will be asking themselves a question: “should I buy an Xbox One or a PS4?” It’s a valid question to ask. But many more people I’ve talked to are asking themselves a much more simple question: “should I buy a PS4?” Every time I hear someone ask me that, it’s a moment to reflect on just how well Sony has come to dominate the market in recent years. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the Xbox One recently, mostly because it’s been interesting to watch Microsoft MSFT +0.00% flip its script and make some pretty bold changes to the way that it’s envisioning its system. I’ve written less about the PS4 because, well, there’s just less to write about: it does its job well, and it’s selling even better. Staying the course is working exceptionally well for them. But now that the PS4′s victory seems pretty well cemented for years to come, it’s interesting to look at it from Sony’s perspective again.
For me, it comes down to simplicity. The PS4 defined itself in opposition to the Xbox One essentially as soon as Microsoft began faltering. Where Xbox One was confused, over-reaching and conflicted, Sony seemed to say, the PS4 was wonderfully straightforward. It’s a game console; it plays games, and it plays them well. Simplicity is a huge part of why people play games on consoles rather than on PCs, and PS4 struck that nerve perfectly. People just wanted to play new games on a more powerful system, and Sony offered that up with grace.
It’s not just marketing speak, either: you can see it from the second you boot up the two consoles. The Xbox One is still struggling with Windows 8-era tiles, the OS is frequently slower than its counterpart, it occasionally thinks you’re trying to talk to it, and it’s much-vaunted “snapping” feature is either ignoreable or annoying. The PS4, on the other hand, has one simple menu that lets you play games or stream apps, and it does so pretty quickly and painlessly. The games on both systems are more or less the same: they’ve each got their stable of exclusives, essentially canceling each other out, and third-party games tend to be more important anyway. That simplicity remains the core: most of us are interacting with a small handful of operating systems in our day-to-day lives, and as a result we want them to get to the point as quickly as possible.
Going back a little bit, the PS4′s dominance shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. The Playstation and the PS2 both emerged victorious in their time as well, after all. The notion of this binary, Xbox vs. Playstation console war is only as old as the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 generation, mostly because Nintendo decided to strike out on its own and do something entirely different with the Wii. But in retrospect, that was a weird generation indeed. Microsoft started things off by screwing up about as badly as it could have by shipping millions of defective units and earning itself a reputation for hardware failure. Then, once that had settled down, Sony managed to screw up as well by launching the PS3 a year later at a whopping $499 at a time when a gamer could get a (functioning) Xbox for $299. So things got off to a uniquely rocky start — one that ultimately favored Xbox 360, but shook out much more evenly as the years went on.
Looking at things now, however, it seems like that last generation may have been a bit of a flub borne out of mutual incompetence. The dominant narrative of the Playstation being the king of the console market still holds, and has held for quite some time. It’s not to say that the Xbox One couldn’t have beaten the PS4 — maybe if it hadn’t launched at $499 or alienated its core market — just that Sony had more advantages going in than we may have thought.
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