As part of the endless conversation about how the PS4 and Xbox One’s specs stack up against each other, Alan Bowman, Microsoft’s Regional Vice President of Retail Sales and Marketing in Australasia, talked about his views on the comparison with GamePlanet, ultimately saying that it will come down to games:
We’re optimistic about this generation as well. We’ve got a unique value proposition, and from just a pure specs perspective it’s always gonna be [a] fairly marginal difference. The purists are gonna argue the toss, but I think it comes down to the games. You’re gonna see great exclusive games on Xbox One, and when you look at the cross-platform games… there’s gonna be exclusive content on Xbox One. We’d like to be in more markets – this is a global business – but it’s also a long-term business, and we’ll progressively launch in more markets over the coming year.
Speaking of those markets, Bowman continued by discussing how the Xbox doesn’t do very well in Japan (the Xbox 360 sold just 281 units last week), where he mentioned how strong Sony is in that particular region:
That has been an ongoing challenge. Being a local brand makes such a huge difference in Japan. Sony are so strong in Japan as it’s their home base, and they certainly get a lot of support from the customer as well as the ecosystem – the local third-party developers, who primarily publish for Sony. We had moments midway through the life of the 360 where we’d see a sales spike if we had Japanese developer content released. Japan is very [local] content-driven. Same applies for Korea, same applies to Taiwan. Most of north Asia is very content-driven.
While Sony hasn’t revealed which demographic the majority of 4.2 million PS4 owners come from, New Zealand Xbox lead Steven Blackburn said of the Xbox One, “It’s absolutely as male and core-skewed as you can imagine, but that will change.”
If the majority of PS4 owners reflected you, what would we all be? Millionaires with pet sharks? Let us know in the comments below.
