This is very bad and its not like Series is a bad, overpriced or too late released system.
Well, the Series X isn't, in a hardware sense. Series S was a bad idea tho, let's just admit it. No one wanted a dumbed-down next-gen console at launch that had no option for physical and couldn't even cleaning outperform the One X released three years earlier in most games.
MS's whole idea with Series S was to get the casual and mainstream gamers into the early adopter phase of install base growth, thinking price sensitivity was the key to get there. They then misread sales growth for Series S during the lockdowns as genuine demand, and not for what it really was: people resorting to it as a last-case option because of lack of PS5s, lack of PS4s (as a smaller reason), and lack of Series Xs (also to a smaller degree). The lockdowns also screwed up finances for a lot of people so price sensitivity was a bigger concern.
Right after the lockdowns mostly ended, the real demand for Series S showed itself and it was...terrible. From middle of 2022 and onwards the sales for it just kept dropping hard and flatlining, leading to extremely aggressive deals and promos to try driving demand. Bursts of Series X supply helped prevent total numbers from being a catastrophe, but even that version's sales were mainly thanks to still-limited PS5 supply (as would be proven in the last months of 2022 and throughout all of 2023 up to today).
Microsoft tried having it both ways from the jump and instead they basically self-cannibalized their own demand. The reason Sony didn't do an S/X approach was because they knew it would not work and they were proven right. At most Microsoft should've made Series S a One S refresh with native BC of all XBO games, slight perf boosts, and marketed mainly as a cloud client for Series X games with maybe SOME Series X games getting ports via cross-gen availability on One S (now Series S). This probably could've been a very cost-effective system with less RAM (8 GB vs 10 GB), slower SSD-based storage, smaller GPU and simplified CPU with same 512 GB capacity storage for $199 also marketed as a media streaming device against things like the higher-end Apple TV models.
That's a Series S that probably would've actually sold quite well off of genuine demand, not compromise the Series X, and been affordably price-reduced after a couple of years. Instead they released the actual Series S which has turned out to be a dead-end plastic husk no one really wants. Ironically, like people such as
Audiophile
have posted in the PS6 speculation thread, Sony can take a similar approach with a PS6 Lite that actually succeeds where the Series S failed. The key being:
don't make it a system developers are forced to support with native current-gen titles!
This 100 million forecast was stupid if they simply based it on the 80 million Xbox 360 units sold, ignoring all the nuances and context.
- X360 numbers were inflated because of RROD and people buying replacements.
- X360 launched 1 year before PS3.
- Sony messed up the PS3 launch and introduced a more expensive console.
All those factors mattered.
They knew PS4 was not going to be more expensive and that it would instead be cheaper than Xbox One. They also knew that PS4 would launch in the same year. They would also know that Xbox One numbers would not be inflated by an RROD-type situation again.
The 100 million units projects was simply out of touch. And the results proved it.
Dunno about the part where they knew PS4 wouldn't be more expensive; I mean the doc does have this 720 @ $299 and the PS4 itself was $399. However, the 720 here also seems certainly weaker than the XBO that actually came out (amazing that is even possible). 4 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB, ARM cores instead of the Jaguar cores (while the Jag cores weren't great themselves, they were still likely better than whatever ARM cores MS considered for 720 at the time), likely a weaker GPU at least on paper, etc.
But aside that, yes, they set a 100 million unit sales target based on scenarios that completely avoided the bullet points you listed, all of which failed to materialize for them with the PS4. Also again, I want to say that MS also assumed Sony wouldn't have gotten their 1P software in line by the end of the PS3 generation; this doc seems like it was written up somewhere around 2009/2010 anyhow.
So seeing Sony get all that 1P software momentum between 2010 and 2013, and noticing Xbox's own 1P teams were complacent and faltering by comparison, combined with the reality of PS4's specs likely floating around and seeing the Wii U crash and burn, made Microsoft have a SEGA moment and panic with some hurried redesign of the 720 to manifest the XBO we would come to know. But they still kept the Kinect v2, because they still wanted to achieve all the multimedia goals of the 720 even if they had to bulk up the design to better compete with the PS4.
And that's all probably what led to the $200 MSRP increase over time.
You know, I always thought that - behind all the PR bluster - MS had to have realistic expectations of their hardware’s sales potential. That they were willing to talk big but take the losses and play the long-game. But, nope, they really are just incompetent. There is simply no way that a company with that much money and data can just be unlucky this many times. For all the claims that Neogaf is “pro Sony,” things like this show that, really, the opinions here are far too generous towards the decision made by Xbox execs.
To believe that their 720 / whatever could potentially sell 100 million units is, itself, reasonably aspirational.
To believe that the product they envisioned could do so at the price they proposed is demonstrably laughable. And yes, for us, that’s with the benefit of hindsight - but that’s where the “competence” thing comes into it.
I mean, again, I feel people are misreading something in the document, because the 720 mentioned there is not really the XBO that actually came out. ARM cores instead of x86-64 Jaguar cores. 4 GB DDR4 instead of 8 GB DDR3. 32 MB EDRAM instead of 32 MB ESRAM (which is more expensive).
"Something" definitely came through along the way that forced MS to adjust significant parts of the 720's design and I think that "something" was a combination of Sony regaining presence with their 1P (and turning around the PS3's fortunes; remember at some point in the late '00s and even early 2010's speculation was rampant that Sony themselves could've gone bankrupt or at least been unable to do a lot of moves going forward), and more of the PS4's specifications possibly being found out.
That would have likely scared Microsoft into making changes to the 720 in order to be more competitive with the PS4, because what good would targeting Apple, Google etc. get them if they couldn't even deal with Sony? That was probably Microsoft's thinking, hence redesigns. A lot of the XBO we know today still mirrors the 720 design but some of the notable changes would have likely seen increases to projected costs. Plus, MS still wanted Kinect v2 there as standard; they still had their multimedia ambitions and weren't going to give them up, but including the Kinect v2 AND a system that could actually completely go toe-to-toe with or beat PS4 in tech specs would've likely put XBO at a $599 price point, so they made compromises...the to console performance itself.
I mean that should be obvious on one level since they went with an ESRAM/DDR3 combo; the DDR3 was for games AND the multimedia stuff, and the ESRAM because they knew the EDRAM would be too slow to offset the slow DDR speeds games would be using. 32 MB of ESRAM running
slightly faster than PS4's 8 GB GDDR5 was still a better alternative than 8 GB of DDR3 or even DDR4 running at only about half of PS4's total RAM, even if doing so meant a split memory architecture.
