Xbox One and PS4 – A Love Story (Not)

Since the official announcement from Microsoft that they are planning to support play between Xbox One, PC and other networks, there has been a lot said about the possible cooperation. Now, if you’re an avid gamer like me, you will appreciate the dickishness of the move. We all know that PlayStation and Xbox have been worse than a cat and dog for over a decade now. So making an invitation for cooperation publically was pretty clever, leaving not much space and time for Sony to respond without looking like “the bad guys” in the situation.

Sony of course was quick to response; it wasn’t very clear though. To quote “PlayStation has been supporting cross-platform play between PC on several software titles […] We would be happy to have the conversation with any publishers or developers who are interested in cross-platform play.” I guess it is safe to assume that this is all a bit in the air now and no serious and committing talks have been held. We are probably far, far away from any peace agreement in the console market wars. Which imho is a shame as it would make a massive difference and aid progress and development for the benefit of players. But what do I know. Let’s compare the two in order to find out if a possible cooperation is viable for both and so – more likely to happen in the not too distant future.

Sony are winning big time in terms of sales at present. PS4 has sold over 36 million items (numbers for January 2016). Microsoft have always been a bit shady about their stats, but an estimate from VGChartz put their sales at around 20 million up to February. Even without being exact, it is clear that PS4 is leading the race.

So, with that in mind you can understand why Sony would not be so optimistic about a cross-platform cooperation – they have more units out there. So if all your friends worldwide are playing on PlayStation, you will go and get one to join them, right? Imagine you can get an Xbox and still play with them? You get it, many people would. So that’s a huge disadvantage for Sony from an eventual future cooperation. Realistically speaking, as it stands, gamers can already play console to PC. But console to console will seriously affect sales in a very unpredictable way. So as gamers, as much as we would all like to see a friendship between the two long-standing rivals, it is not going to happen soon, that’s for sure. But opening the talks for it is a good step forward I suppose. The only way I see that happening is if Sony get so confident and comfortable with the sales of the PS VR (which is kind of getting there), that they simply decide to not worry about their market share and give that historic cooperation a go just for the fun of it, as risky as it may sound. It is a business, I know but then – it is about games, right?