PlayStation 4 Pro? Ruh-Roh, Microsoft

For a brief, shining moment, Microsoft’s nifty new Xbox One S dominated the video game headlines. And then Sony and its PlayStation 4 Pro happened. And now everything is different. Again.

Coming into this generation of consoles, I felt very strongly that Microsoft would ride its Xbox 360 momentum to great success while Sony would stumble along like it had been at the time, seemingly never able to get anything right. Key to this, I thought, were the ardently loyal Xbox fans, who had weathered Microsoft’s $1 billion warranty fix for the Xbox 360, in many cases happily sending their consoles back multiple times just so they could keep playing. Even Apple couldn’t hope for such loyalty.

Boy, did I get that one wrong.

This week, Sony confirmed that it has sold over 40 million PlayStation 4 consoles, over double the number of Xbox Ones that Microsoft has sold. But that’s just recent news: From the moment both consoles debuted in late 2013, the PS4 has outpaced Xbox One, so strongly in fact that Microsoft simply stopped providing sales numbers.

And that previous generation of consoles? Many still seem to remember that the Xbox 360 outsold the PlayStation 3. But it turns out that was a temporary condition, due in part to the Xbox 360 being released a year earlier than than the PS3, and in part to a temporary—and fleeting—mid-lifecycle bump from Kinect. If you look at the sales figures now, you will see something that may surprise you: As it turns out, Sony beat Microsoft. The PS3 outsold the Xbox 360.

What I and many others did find odd when the new console generation first launched in 2013, however, was that Microsoft seemed to be making the same mistakes with Xbox One that Sony had, previously, with the PS3. Its console was more expensive, but Microsoft stubbornly insisted that the price differential was deserved, because the Xbox One came with a Kinect, which it saw as key to the console’s success. (Sony did the same with the PS3, which featured a then-expensive Blu-ray drive. The cheaper Xbox 360 was just DVD.)

We now know that not to be the case, though to be fair, the quick rise and fall of the Kinect for Xbox 360 was all the clue we really needed. Kinect added fully $100 to the price of Microsoft’s console, and has proven quite uninteresting to most customers. So while the cheaper PS4 dashed out of the gates with the speed of Usain Bolt, the Xbox One lurched and staggered, directionless.

(Some will point, too, to Microsoft’s mixed marketing messages ahead of the Xbox One launch. That is absolutely part of it as well.)

Anyway, with almost three years behind us and the PS4 outselling Xbox One by roughly 2-to-1, both Sony and Microsoft have come to the same conclusions about how and when this generation of consoles will be improved. And instead of using the old playbook, where a console generation was only changed mid-stream for cost reduction, this time will be different. The PS4 and Xbox One will be updated in steps, as are smart phones and other mobile devices. Meaning that for the first time in a long while, backwards compatibility is retained while newer consoles still offer improved functionality.

I voiced my support for this strategy privately to Microsoft over the summer, before it announced what it was doing. And then publicly, here on this site and on the Windows Weekly and What the Tech podcasts. And whether its console upgrades or other Xbox strategy changes, it amazes me to see that some people—especially video game enthusiasts and bloggers—just don’t get it.

But that doesn’t matter. Because it’s happening.

Ahead of E3 this year, Sony announced that, yes, it was working on new revisions to the PlayStation 4 console but, no, it would not be discussing them at the show. I felt—still feel—that that was a mistake, and that Sony had artificially ceded the spotlight to Microsoft, which went on to “win” E3 this year with a very transparent look at its evolving strategy for Xbox.

In the couple of months since E3, news about Xbox One S and speculation about Xbox “Project Scorpio,” the coming high-end Xbox One console, have been the big topics of discussion in the video game space. The Xbox One S has allegedly sold better than Microsoft expected, though one has to wonder—I’m trying to learn the lessons of Kinect and the first Xbox One here, folks—why or how it is that the Launch Edition Xbox One S is still available at Amazon.com as I write this, despite the fact that it’s a limited time offer.

Anyway, Sony just sucked all the air out of the room. And as the dust settles on this week’s announcement of a less expensive and cost-reduced PlayStation 4 and a higher-end, more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro, one naturally wonders how things will proceed going forward. That is, will the Xbox One make up for lost momentum and catch up—even surpass–the PS4? Or are we in for more of the same?

In the wake of E3, I was hopeful but realistic. I felt that Microsoft could close the gap, that this generation of consoles would come to a close with less of a gap than we see now. But in reviewing what Sony is doing with the PS4, it’s not clear how that can ever happen.

Microsoft isn’t afraid of Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, The Verge’s Tom Warren tells us. But they should be. I think this console is going to be a monster, and it’s going to give the PS4 a mid-stream bump. And unlike the Kinect with the Xbox 360, this one isn’t going to be (as) temporary.

The issues are many.

Today, the PS4 is technically superior to the Xbox One. And while I think the real-world differences are minor, we’ve never seen an end to the screen resolution comparisons, where the same games consistently deliver better graphics on PS4 than they do on Xbox One.

Unlike Microsoft, Sony actually has a VR strategy, and its PlayStation VR solution will work on the all PS4 consoles—the original, the slimmer new version, and the PS4 Pro—when it arrives this fall. Microsoft? We got nothing.

Unlike Microsoft, Sony is offering 4K gaming this year, a key concern for ardent video game fans, and a feature that you need expensive and complex PCs for today. When I see that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare AND the remastered Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will BOTH be available in 4K on a PlayStation this year, a part of me dies inside. And not a small part. That matters to me. A lot.

No, the PS4 Pro will not play 4K Blu-ray UHD discs. But as anyone who has tried to play such discs on Xbox One S will tell you, Microsoft’s little console is barely up to the tasks: Disc-based movies often wheeze and lurch under the performance load, and the console revs up its fan like a jet engine, during playback and for about 15-to-20 minutes afterwards.

(What the PS4 will do, of course, is play 4K streaming video. Which is A-OK with me.)

And what the frick is Project Scorpio anyway? I just praised Microsoft for its transparency, but all we really know about this console is that it will ship next year, and it will play Xbox One games, offer 4K gaming, and will—vaguely—provide “high fidelity” (read: not 4K) VR. That’s it.

Sony waited to announce its next PS4 consoles, but it will release them—both of them—this year. And we know exactly what each of them will provide.

This holiday season will likely be another bloodbath, unless of course you’re a PlayStation fan. But there’s still hope that “Project Scorpio” will turn things around: After all, you can argue that the strategy in being so vague is that Microsoft can simply improve Scorpio between now and the launch. But isn’t this just Windows phone all over again? Where we look for the next big thing that will put it over the top? Am I really the only one worried about that?

Microsoft’s response to PlayStation 4 Pro is pretty much the last chance that that they have of salvaging this console generation. Arguably, it’s already too late.