@porkChop
This is the danger when it comes to Phil’s conveniently timed slices of truth.
“Whether or not that’s even true, that was before people built their digital libraries on PS4/XBO.”
This is true and reflective of what Phil was saying, which was also true. But only a slice of the truth. The seventh gen is when online networks became the standard for consoles and when people started building digital libraries. Here, Xbox had the advantage. 360 beat PS3 to market. They got people onto Live before there was any competition. The PSN was viewed as substantially inferior for many years after it did launch, and PS3 was mocked for having no games.
The narrative shifted by the end of the seventh gen thanks to Sony’s excellent exclusives output and the PS+ monthly games. Note that the former feeds into the latter. Great exclusives output obviously means Sony has more of its own quality games to buoy the PS+ free games library, but it also has the domino effect of allowing Sony to get better deals to add 3rd party content to PS+ because the service isn’t as reliant on them, and there is more competition for those 3rd party games at retail.
Despite the shifting momentum, PS4 was still at a disadvantage due to the lack of backward compatibility with PS3. Xbox was backward compatible with 360. Xbox 360 digital purchases were playable on Xbox One.
Xbox had those advantages. Phil is telling a partial truth. Gen 8 was the worst one to lose, but not because that was the first generation when digital ecosystems became prominent. They were prominent during the seventh generation. Gen 8 was the worst to lose because it was the first gen where digital network investment was an incentive to stay with the same brand, and Xbox had the upper hand but lost it — to the competitor that focused on putting out great games.
