Battle Lines Are Drawn In The New Round of the Console Wars

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

Battle Lines Are Drawn In The New Round of the Console Wars

With November—and the launch of two new consoles—just around the corners, strategies are now quite clear and there's quite a bit to cover. But who's got the best position going in? Who's likely to lead in the early stages? And who's likely to ultimately come out on top? These are questions well worth asking, and the answers—at least, what we can speculate about the answers—might surprise you.

Sony is walking its PlayStation 4 into a field packed with advantages for it. A terrific public reception at E3 coupled with a lower price tag and rumors about a possible proprietary VR system are going to give it a lot of push, but add on to this the fact that, in the United States, the PlayStation 4 will come out a week ahead of the Xbox One—the European launch of the PlayStation 4, meanwhile, comes a little over two weeks later on November 30—and that makes a very welcoming picture for PlayStation 4 fans.

Microsoft, by comparison, will be walking in more expensive, a little later—it plans to launch November 22, and in 13 different countries all at once down from the originally planned launch of 21 countries--and coming off an E3 event that was nothing short of disastrous for it. However, it's worth noting that it's worked hard since then to recover, and according to reports, now has a stock of preorders in line that beats the stock of preorders on hand for the Xbox 360. Perhaps better is the news that Microsoft is boosting the clock speed on its processor, up to 1.75 GHz instead of the original 1.6 GHz. That's good news by many measures; boosting speed suggests there's little in the way of trouble with the current stock of chips so “red ring” style problems are much less likely to happen.

The issue of games follows, and both look to have a fairly strong launch stock on hand. Though some reports indicate that Sony is leaning a bit more toward MMOs than Microsoft, it's likely that both will frequently intersect in terms of what games are offered. More information about this point will likely also follow in the weeks ahead.

So who do I put as likely to come out ahead on this one? Personally, I figure Microsoft will edge out Sony, but only just. Sony had too good a showing for the last few months to count out, and will probably get a few folks jumping ship from Microsoft too. But Microsoft had a pretty big following going into this, and the arrival of “Dead Rising 3” as a Microsoft exclusive certainly can't hurt things either.

One thing, however, is clear: this season is going to be one to watch in no uncertain terms, and though it may be a close battle going into the start of the newest round of the console wars, it may not stay close for long.
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