That's true of PlayStation now too. Sure, it takes a couple of years, but I'm fine with that if it means saving hundreds of dollars and not having a machine next to my TV that only collects dust after playing 3 games on it.
If I've got money to invest now, I'm going to invest in two things that are likely to make money rather than waiting to see if the first one makes money over a couple of years. Especially when ActiBlizz was on a fire sale.
The problem is that development times exploded upward, so it takes so, so long to get a game out the door, and it appears as if they've done nothing. The first game from the Zenimax acquisition that started development under Microsoft leadership likely won't come out until 2026, for example. Sony already released most of their heavy hitters, and the next big Sony first-party game similar to God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, or The Last of Us is likely several years away still (Wolverine, maybe). The next one after that will probably be a PlayStation 6 game.
As for Killer Instinct, rumor has it we'll see another one in the near future, probably from Bandai Namco now that they're not working on Soul Calibur or Smash.
I'm not. Advance Wars isn't on there either. They're going to find a way to sell them to you for way more than the subscription of NSO, in addition to what you're paying for NSO.
I don’t think it’s hardware. It’s a differentiator. Tell me why I (or whoever) should pick an Xbox over a PlayStation?
They know it's a losing battle to try to build the same product as an entrenched competitor after they burned themselves with the Xbox One, which is why they much prefer you're a subscriber to Game Pass, with an Xbox or not.
Some people may love Game Pass, but most people I know either never subscribed to it or only tested it when it was like 1,-€ for a month or whatever.
They've got like 25-30 million subscribers, so it's quite popular. Probably half or a third as popular as Microsoft would like, but it's popular. I myself have plenty of friends who want to play more games than they can afford, and now they can afford them because of Game Pass. Especially the flash in the pan zeitgeist stuff like Exoprimal or Rainbow Six: Extraction that they can say they've played but will never touch again.
What else differentiates it from the PS5 in a positive way?
Quick resume. To be honest, what sets the PS5 apart from the Xbox hardware in a positive way? The SSD speeds that ended up not even mattering much for Ratchet & Clank, from what I hear of the PC port.
The controller is…well, a decent controller. It doesn’t do anything special like adaptive triggers, yet it costs almost the same as a DualSense, and if you count in the optional (!) battery pack, it’s quite a bit more expensive even.
By contrast, I know tons of people who hate the PS5 controller, not the least of which for its short battery life and inability to swap batteries like you can for Xbox. As a fighting game player, I know competitive players who hate the d-pad, and Sony did everyone dirty by requiring the use of a PS5 controller only even though the entire scene has had controllers for a decade that would work just fine, and even work on the PS5 when running a "PS4 game" on a PS5. Xbox's controllers are backward and forward compatible. If Sony had some kind of reason for requiring the functionality of the new controller, sure, have at it, but they put this requirement in place for games that make no use of the new controller's features at all, which is a dick move.
If you want to win market share, deliver a better product. With better services. With better conditions. For lower prices.
I think they did exactly that, but as far as which console sells more units, it's still PlayStation, because they have a couple of games that, at least for a couple of years, you can only play on PlayStation. But I think Microsoft saw that they were never going to be able to compete with that directly, at least before their acquisition spree, so the Xbox is just a low-cost machine that gets you into Game Pass, long-term.
Does even Sony utilize the gyro though? Returnal didn't when I played it on a friend's PS5, and that game really felt like it needed it to control comfortably.
That will tend to happen, but there are always ways to find beginners. Guilty Gear's floor system is pretty good at it; it's the higher ranks that have matchmaking issues. Tekken's ranking system is really good, but the netcode is really bad, so you'll have to wait for Tekken 8 to expand your pool of players that you can feasibly have a good match with. Anything that's on Game Pass, like Guilty Gear is now, will have a regular stream of low-level players. It made it really enjoyable to pick up Killer Instinct all these years later, even though I'm on the Steam version, because it's got cross play with Game Pass (note that KI is weird in this case, because only the casual queue is cross play). For a lot of other fighting games, you can usually just ping a beginner role on the game's Discord, which isn't tedious like it sounds, because you only need one other person to play with to enjoy a fighting game.
I also understand that $60-$70 can be steep, but I'd highly recommend you try playing at launch with one fighting game that interests you. Street Fighter 6 is still enjoying a larger online population (meaning more low-level players) than most fighting games, historically, have ever seen even at their peaks. Mortal Kombat 1 is launching in September and Tekken 8 will likely launch within a year, and both seem to be focused on making single player modes to make that launch price more worth it. Or you can hold out for Project L, but that might be more than a year or two away, and you've got several big opportunities to experience that launch day period between now and then.
Vagante is the one I remember most clearly for that example. I really loved Streets of Rogue, and I wanted another 4-player, online and local multiplayer, action roguelike.
Dead Cells was billed as a metroidvania roguelike, but it's more like a Castlevania roguelike; pre-Symphony of the Night. So I searched for metroidvania roguelikes and came across A Robot Named Fight. You get a new version of Super Metroid every time you play. It's phenomenal.
I got really into Fantasy Strike one summer and finally understood what made fighting games tick. I looked for other fighting games that worked on Linux. Today, the only fighting game I know that doesn't work on Linux is Dragon Ball FighterZ, but at the time, there was literally only one other fighting game that worked on Linux short of emulation, and that was Skullgirls. Skullgirls is now my favorite game ever.
I have a beefy PC because it plays nearly everything. I have a Steam Deck because it plays most of that stuff when I'm on a train. My favorite games of the past few years run the gamut when it comes to system requirements, and since about 2017 especially, I have largely not been impressed by AAA games, with some exceptions. There are some genres that see more love than others, but chances are whatever type of game you enjoy most is out there and just not getting the most marketing. I've found some of my favorite games ever by just checking boxes for features that were important to me in Steam's advanced search. You have no commitment to buy the biggest games just because they've got the most hype.
Even if Microsoft wasn't bringing their games to PC for the longest time, there are other factors that would have pushed Sony in that direction. The games that they're making are immensely expensive to make, and they can't necessarily bank on console sales recouping that cost as guaranteed as they used to. And then there was also the supply shortages caused by the pandemic that prevented PS5s from being picked up by ready and willing customers.
Cost to performance ebbs and flows with each console generation, and console generations are getting longer, or perhaps disappearing if Microsoft is to be believed. PC gaming's market share has been steadily rising for over a decade now, to the point where PC versions of some games that used to be console-only releases now outsell their console counterparts. There are a lot of reasons we could guess as to why this is, but I don't think they're wholly two different markets, and I don't think Sony thinks this either, regardless of what they said in court. They're preparing to set up their own PC storefront, probably without anything that will make people want to use it besides exclusives, even though that's failed for everyone else who tried it, but signs are pointing toward them preparing to do it.