With game pass popping off the last 18 months it seems like Xbox has really hit their stride as a publishing house. Admittedly they’ve largely done this by throwing billions upon billions of dollars to buy IP, but Expedition 33, Palworld, blue Prince and other hits popping off shows this hasn’t exclusively been the case.
Meanwhile, Sony have had the most expensive flop in video game history with Concord, PSVR2 basically being DOA, and a perplexing pivot to chasing live service trends has meant that the system has missed out on several potential first party hits. Their subscription service pales comparatively to game pass, and there is very little of interest coming in the pipeline.
The PS5 has won this gen over Xbox in terms of sales, but I think customer confidence in their approach has dropped massively, at least for me.
I like everything about the PS5 better: I LOVE the controller, UI, games play awesome on the machine and in general I prefer their more story-entered games BUT PS+ straight up sucks, there’s nothing on there for me and its outrageously priced. Xbox on the other hand still runs great, everything about the controller and UI is just fine but game pass rules. Its also overpriced but at least they have a massive catalogue of games I actually want to try.
I forgot to mention the controller! God I wish those haptics took off, the tech is really cool. I worry that Sony will abandon it as an experiment that didn’t take off.