SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Was it though? Kinect was lambasted because it ended up increasing the price of the console by $100. It also forced them to go with a then 1.2 tflops GPU making the PS4 50% more powerful. Then they had 10% of those 1.2 tflops reserved for Kinect. Phil had to remove kinect from the packaging, remove the kinect GPU allocation and increase clocks just to get xbox in a better shape. He righted the ship but only after Don had crashed it straight into an iceberg.This is the kind of thing that Xbox One got roasted for when in reality all MS was doing was promoting other features. Just because they promoted plugging in an HDMI to run cable tv through Xbox and do NFL polls on Sunday afternoon doesn't mean they were abandoning gaming. MS actually did hardly any Kinect V2 stuff on Xbox One. But people grilled them for it and Sony sat back doing that YT video while Spencer or Don Mattrick were putting out flames doing Q&A.
The same can now be seen with PS. Sony is surely still making SP games, just like MS was still going to have games for One. Spiderman 2 and Wolverine are coming out and they already got sequels of GOW, Horizon and GT released (or just about to), and also R&C and DS too. But their marketing lately makes it seem like they arent doing any SP games and all they care about is GAAS and PC and PSVR2 (with no BC) or buying up small studios to make GAAS or PC ports. Its the same thing now with pissed gamers, Hermen Hulst doing Q&A. And all MS does lately is sit back and issue out Game Pass news.
I have always held X1's launch lineup in high regard. Don had the lineup. So yes, he did not abandon the core gamers, but he did put kinect casuals above the core gamers by handicapping the console specs and especially the price. The DDR3 was chosen specifically to give them enough RAM to do the fancy OS multimedia features which meant they simply ruled out GDDR5 early on.
Those decisions cost them a generation. One could argue it cost them $83 billion in Zenimax and CoD purchases because if they had held the lead, CoD wouldve continued to have Xbox timed exclusive DLC and Skyrim and Fallout wouldve sold the most on X1. Sony abandoning their core audience in favor of fortnite casuals, PC gamers and PS4 owners is going to have the same effect sooner or later.