Seven years ago the Xbox One and PS4 were launched. Over the next week, both next-gen siblings of these come to market, both based around very different marketing and player focusses.
To me, it feels like the last seven years is where gaming has stepped up. Not only has the visual quality of games lept to new heights (great examples of this – Forza Horizon and Uncharted 4), but the stories and narratives of games have not only got deeper but far more important and become part of key cultural conversations. From ‘The Last of Us’ Parts 1 & 2, to ‘God of War’, these stories have made us emotionally involved in ways rarely seen before.
However, both Xbox and PlayStation are forging and investing in two very different visions of the future, and both quite opposite sides of the scale. Playstation has built one of the greatest games libraries ever on the PS4 via PlayStation Exclusives. It aims to continue this into the PS5 generation, with three Playstation exclusives ready for launch, although only ‘Godfall’ is purely exclusive to the PS5. It also has at least five major other exclusives already lined up for 2021. Playstation says it is being player focussed by investing in studios creating some of the best and most unique games to date, a bold vision that worked well with PS4, but can it work for PS5 as well? Only time will tell.
Xbox has taken a vastly different approach to this. Whilst Playstation market £70 exclusives, Xbox is focussed on a £10 subscription model that offers hundreds of games at a players convenience. GamePass is a revolutionary games model, simply put it is the Netflix of gaming. Pay your fee and get access to many, many games instantly which can be played via game over-the-air streaming or fully downloaded to your console. GamePass is built on games from all four generations of Xbox, meaning you can play the first Halo right up to Halo Infinite (when it releases). All for your £10 a month. Xbox does not have a strong history when it comes to first-party games or exclusives, however, whatever games like these are made for Xbox will be available ‘day one’ on GamePass from here on out. That is pretty startling, and astounding value for money. There is one key worry for this, why create new gen of console pushing out pure power, when to begin with it may only be playing nearly twenty-year-old games? That is a slight hole in the strategy that people are identifying with Xbox. Again, how this plays out only time will tell, and this approach may take a bit longer to tell. Exclusives we know are a winner, however, GamePass might be awesome, but whether a new console generation can be built on it is a risk Xbox is clearly ready to take.
So whilst next-gen consoles begin to arrive on doorsteps, we are starting to see the next era of games play out, and a real new battling of what the future of gaming looks like. Streaming vs ownership – exclusives vs backward compatibility – Xbox or PlayStation? As the next-gen develops over the next 12 months we will be posting regular sales and general review updates as more games and accessories are launched for each console, we should begin to see who has the early legs in this race November 2021. For now, let’s just play!
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