Freedom Gate Co.
Banned
One of the biggest pieces of misinformation spreading on the internet is that the online policies where the biggest factor in the Xbox Ones failure to be competitive worldwide in the market against the PS4. As well as it being competitive, but still losing, in it's strongest market, the US.
First, I want to point out that the Xbox One reveal and the Xbox One E3 2013 are not the same. Many people combine the two together, the Xbox One's E3 was pretty good and even brought back Killer Instinct. It was the online policies that gave Sony the E# win despite having imo, the worse conference, and sneaking by with the announcement of paying for online.
Now the first thing people forget is that the Xbox One sold 1 million in 24 hours just like the PS4, and was not far from the PS4's sales by years end despite the Xbox One only releasing in 13 countries. You could not tell for months were Xbox was headed because for the first several months since launch one could argue that the policies and the reversal did nothing to effect new Xbox excitement, and your argument would be correct.
The reason why Xbox ended up falling behind was because fans and Microsoft both could not tell where things would end up half a year later:
1. When Xbox One launched there was great demand. But releasing late in other countries would create an unnecessary uphill battle later. This wasn't obvious at first but it quickly came back to bite MS in the butt. Some would blame this on the old internet policies but the truth is it was mainly Kinect that led to the delay.
2. People had no problems paying over $500 for new console hype and the improved Kinect did have some interest initially. But once march came around people were not spending $500 for a console in the slow season. It became clear that the price would become an issue once TitanFall month did not go as expected, it still did ok, but given the amount of push the game and the bundle were given this would become a problem. Leading to a cheaper SKU options in the summer.
3. Kinect itself was a fad, but that wouldn't become obvious until TitanFall month AND Kinects performance once they introduced stand-alone SKU's. If you went just by the first several months it was really unclear that Kinect was a problem in the market. One could argue it wasn't, but it quickly proved to become worthless once it was put out on its own.
4. Microsoft even before things became bad, was not pushing for as many timed exclusives as it did early in the 360's life. But the PS4 did, getting the rights to big games for extended periods of time. Why this was still doesn't make much sense since this was before Xbox fell way behind, but it gave the PS4 a lot of the "few games brought a year" audience. Same with timed DLC.
Xbox One launching late in numerous countries was a disaster, and it was mostly because no one was able to see that Kinect was dying rapidly until several months after launch. I mention this since Kinect was the primary reason for the delay (language). Xbox One also having a high-price was also something that ended up hurting it once Xbox entered the spring months. Especially in Europe. It wasn't until the spring months that Microsoft started to realize they had to change strategies long-term.
But all the above combined had already given Sony a solid lead that was widening, and Microsoft by the end of 2014 had to result to massive sales and heavy advertising to win those months. But around that time Microsoft went to work on improving their services and developing a rebrand (S and later X) to try and revive the Xbox Ones image. Knowing that they would not be able to remedy some of the mistakes they made in the first 70% of 2013-14 and that they had to completely change strategies.
If Microsoft were able to change the price of Xbox, unbundle kinect, buy more timed games, and released in more countries by the end of 2013, I believe things would be different. But it took Microsoft too long to really start addressing numerous issues. In their defense however, for some of those issues it was not obvious they were theire. But even in spring 2014 when they noticed the many long-term problems they faced, they were still slow to react and it was only since summer 2016 that the fixes finally materialized to the point where now everything is back on track. That's 3 years too long.
But like I said, at first it was not obvious, and people blaming the online policies have ignored the first several months of the Xbox One's life.
