Ever since the release of the original Xbox, there has been a battle between the Xbox and PlayStation users. Even though they are similar systems with similar performance, users always find quarrel where this is none.
On December 3, 1994, the Sony Playstation 1 (or just Playstation as it was called at the time) was released and paved the road to powerful gaming consoles. Because it was such a success, Sony released a more powerful console in March of 2000: the Playstation 2.
Microsoft saw Sony’s high success with gaming consoles and released their Xbox on November 15, 2001, almost a year after Playstation 2 came out. Some of the hardcore Playstation fans were mad about this because it felt like Microsoft was just trying to steal Sony’s thunder.
Now, let’s talk about names for a second. Sony has kept with the simple theme of numbers for their consoles. e.g. PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 etc.. But Microsoft, for some reason, just can’t decide. They’ve gone all over the place, starting with the Xbox and then jumping to the 360. They then went with Xbox One, which confused customers into thinking it was just the original. Now they announce their next-gen console will be called the Xbox series X. It just sounds like it’s a limited edition Xbox, one that you can only get if you buy a $5 chalupa box from Taco Bell! Even with the different Xbox One consoles, there’s the One S (or series S, not sure if there’s a difference). I can’t even tell if the series X is a new console all together or just another sub-series of the Xbox one.
Four years after the original Xbox, Microsoft released the next generation of their gaming console and named it the Xbox 360. A year later, Sony released the Playstation 3, which had slightly less power but more features such as Bluray, more storage, and Bluetooth for the controller. Bluetooth was still relatively new then, only about 6 or 7 years old, so seeing it added to the Playstation 3 was quite exciting. Even with the lower performance, Playstation sold more consoles than the Xbox by 3.4 million. Oddly enough, Nintendo crushed both Sony and Microsoft in sales and sold over 100 million Wii consoles.
When asked about PS4 vs. Xbox sales, Robert Karnes, an employee of Ukiah’s Kingdom Games, stated that Playstation sold much better than Xbox. Robert believes that Playstation sells better because Sony is more focused on single-player games than multiplayer. He thinks that Xbox is more multiplayer based and the games they have either require or are heavily structured around multiplayer. Robert also believes that because there is not much internet service around Mendocino County, players are more likely to go for the Playstation instead.
My overall assessment, Xbox bad, PS4 good.
