The global outbreak of the epidemic has slowly changed the world, and for this, I believe many gamers feel the same way. Due to the lack of operating rate of the semiconductor industry due to the epidemic, which in turn has made chip production capacity tight, the main theme from graphics cards to game consoles in recent years has been "out of stock". Among them, the shortage of graphics cards is from the earliest expected out-of-stock to the end of 2020, then the first quarter of 2021, then the second half of 2021, and then the second half of 2022.
In the context of tight production capacity in the semiconductor industry, all parties are also eight immortals crossing the sea. A few days ago, after Sony announced that it would continue to produce the previous generation of game console PS4 in 2022 to cope with the shortage of PS5 production caused by the global chip shortage, Microsoft has also confirmed that it will stop producing Xbox One and wait for retailers' inventory to sell out. In this regard, Cindy Walker, senior director of product marketing for Xbox game consoles, also said, "This is to focus on the production of XboxSeries X/S (hereinafter referred to as XSX and XSS). ”
In fact, discontinuing Xbox One is obviously a very normal decision for Microsoft today. Unlike smartphones, game console iterations are undoubtedly much slower, with almost every generation tending to have a host lifecycle of more than 6 years, and a long life cycle means a long tail period that is usually longer. At the turn of the old and the new in each generation, the previous generation of hosts is generally not immediately discontinued, but will be offered as a low-end product to price-sensitive consumers.
However, Xbox One's current Microsoft game console product line seems to have no place of its own. In the eyes of the outside world, the Xbox One generation can almost be called the worst decision made since the birth of the Xbox division.
In Microsoft's game console product mileage, the original Xbox as a newcomer to the console circle, coupled with the beginning of this century is the Japanese game industry as a brilliant period, so its "can't beat" the legendary PS2 at that time is obviously very normal. But in the Xbox 360 era, it is more of a problem in the implementation of the project, although this host originally had a first-mover advantage, and the PS3 that was delayed for a year next door was against the runaway cost and price, as well as the development disaster brought by the CELL architecture, which caused the market to be basically a bearish trend at that time, but the result was not expected, and the outbreak of the "Three Reds Incident" directly made Microsoft lose the good game.
But the Xbox One, by contrast, is more like a complete decision failure, and Microsoft's Xbox division seems to overestimate player loyalty.
In fact, aside from the problem of "three reds", Xbox 360 is a product with a good reputation, which has even helped the boom of console-side online multiplayer games, the promotion of independent games, and the launch of online film and television services in Europe and the United States. But it may have also given Microsoft the illusion that it changed the fate of xbox one and PS4 on that dramatic day at E3 2013. At that "bad" conference, Microsoft emphasized that players can replace discs with digital game libraries, and that each Xbox One must be connected once every 24 hours to ensure that users are the players who own the game, and even bundled Kinect to make it sell for $499.
I have to say that when high-speed broadband is popularized and more and more players are embracing digital entertainment, Microsoft's original intention of positioning Xbox One as a "living room entertainment terminal" is good. However, on the same night, Sony's PS4 conference gave Microsoft a perfect "singing and opposing tone", Microsoft required "host networking, ban second-hand, bundled sales", Sony "allowed second-hand, can always offline games, PS4 only sold for $399", and emphasized that Play Station is always designed to meet the needs of players, always focus on the game.
At this point, the battle for the host in the eighth generation has almost not yet begun, and it is over. According to IGN's top 15 best-selling console sales charts as of 2018, the Xbox One sold only 41 million units, while the PS4 sold 91.6 million units. Therefore, in the eyes of the outside world, Xbox One is almost a product that has changed the fate of Microsoft's Xbox department, overestimating the loyalty of light players to the platform, and directly leading to Xbox One can be described as "dying before the teacher".
Why does Microsoft dare to discontinue Xbox One now? In a sense, it may be because of greater market inertia and higher loyalty from the core player base. Thanks to the unprecedented engineering of XGP and Xbox One's purported strategy of banning used games, players who have bought Xbox over the past decade have tended to gravitate toward the digital version. But in the digital version of the game library, the new XSS can also be played, and not only Xbox One games, but even Xbox 360 and Xbox games can be partially compatible, which can form inertia is obviously much greater than the PS camp. In contrast to the PS faction, players can easily join the Xbox faction after processing the game disc.
More importantly, the Xbox One already has the perfect replacement for the XSS. This sub-era popular console with a lower threshold has achieved unexpected success, so Microsoft is bound to transfer production capacity to new models.
When Microsoft built this generation of consoles, it chose to build two products with similar next-generation features at different prices. The main difference between XSS and XSX is the GPU, which makes XSX support native 4K, while XSS is designed to be 1440P, which is almost equivalent to XSX's GPU performance being almost three times that of XSS. Smaller chips mean that more chips can be split on the same silicon wafer, so this also makes XSS production capacity is bound to be far better than XSX and PS5.
What's more, the previous Xbox One X used AMD in mid-2013, based on the 28nm process of semi-customized architecture "Jaguar", due to the large scale of the chip caused by power consumption and heat generation will not be small, the heat dissipation requirements will be higher, so the production cost of Xbox One X may not be lower than XSS. Since there is a newer and better XSS, there is naturally no need to produce xbox one series products.
In fact, Microsoft discontinued the production of the old host, and Sony wanted to restart the production of the previous generation of hosts, which is actually the result of the difference in the product strategies of the two manufacturers in this generation. Currently, players' views on the two console camps are generally that PS5 loses performance slightly and XSX/XSS is slightly inferior in the game lineup. However, the high and low collocation of XSS and XSX from this stage, obviously has achieved quite excellent results, on the contrary, Sony will be PS5 divided into optical drive version and digital version of the practice, resulting in a $399 non-optical drive version of the PS5 cost performance is worrying.
Generally speaking, the life cycle of a host is composed of the initial period - growth period - maturity period. During the launch period, the main users of the purchase tend to follow the trend with the core players as the main players and a small number of mild players, which is also the time when the product premium is the highest. The next is the growth period when sales continue to climb, after the core players buy, it is necessary to rely on light players to support sales, but the decision-making of light players is often not the game lineup, but the price.
In the case of tight supply, price increases have become inevitable, and the prices of PS5, XSX, and XSS have ushered in a premium worldwide under the "boost" of scalpers. But the same price increase, the large base of the premium space is obviously inevitable, which led to XSS in a considerable number of areas to sell better than XSX. In the same way, XSS will naturally threaten PS5 sales.
To put it simply, under the realistic conditions of tight production capacity leading to price increases and matching the global economy, the impact of price factors on the purchase decisions of mild players is gradually increasing. Microsoft's suspension of Xbox One, the production capacity of XSS, and Sony's restart of PS4 production are actually to compete for consumers. But one thing to say, if the budget is limited and you can only choose between XSS and PS4, it is obvious that XSS as a next-generation host is much more attractive.