Leaked emails have revealed Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s ideas about PlayStation 5 again in early 2020.
Sony revealed a deep dive into PS5 in March 2020 with a broadcast by which PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny confirmed its {hardware} specs.
The announcement revealed PS5 features a customized eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GH and a customized GPU based mostly on AMD’s RDNA 2 structure {hardware} that promised 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute models clocked at 2.23GHz, in addition to 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and a customized 825GB SSD.
Spencer wrote the e-mail to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and chief monetary officer Amy Hood “after almost 12 hours of soaking in their unveil, taking apart their specs and looking at the community responses”. He clearly sounds captivated with Microsoft’s console prospects, understanding full properly what the Xbox Collection X and S would provide when it went on sale alongside the PS5 later that 12 months (who remembers the teraflops conflict?). Coming off the again of the final technology and the Xbox One, which was considerably underpowered in comparison with the PlayStation 4, Microsoft got down to guarantee it had essentially the most highly effective console in the marketplace with the Xbox Collection X, and the PS5 specs reveal in March 2020 confirmed that place.
“We have a better product than Sony has, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services on top of the hardware,” Spencer wrote. “We have the ingredients of a winning plan. I felt the feedback from the BoD discussion on being too confident and maybe this will just reinforce that perception, I get the need to be humbly confident but today was a good day for us.
“We haven’t won anything. And I know we have hard discussions about pricing, P&L, investments etc. This mail isn’t trying to scoop any of that, those discussions really matter. But we can take confidence in our product truth here and I do believe any conversation needs to start with believing in that. This was a good day for Xbox.”
In fact, this e-mail was despatched three-and-a-half years in the past, and so much has occurred because the present technology kicked off. Whereas the PS5 has proved an unlimited gross sales success, gross sales of the Xbox Collection consoles have struggled in latest occasions, with robust year-on-year comparisons and a lightweight launch slate of exclusives.
The truth is, in the course of the Federal Commerce Fee versus Microsoft trial in June, Microsoft admitted Xbox had formally “misplaced the console wars”.
A bit of a doc submitted by Microsoft described its entry into the gaming business in 2001, when its unique Xbox console was outsold by each Sony and Nintendo by a “important margin”. And, per Xbox, it hasn’t stopped “shedding” the “console wars” ever since.
“Xbox’s console has constantly ranked third (of three) behind PlayStation and Nintendo in gross sales. In 2021, Xbox had a share of 16% whereas Nintendo and PlayStation had shares of [redacted] and [redacted], respectively. Likewise for console revenues and share of consoles presently in use by players (‘put in base’), Xbox trails with 21% whereas PlayStation and Nintendo have shares of [redacted] and [redacted], respectively.”
Microsoft is presently embroiled in maybe the largest, most devastating leak in Xbox historical past, with FTC trial paperwork revealing its plans for a mid-gen Xbox refresh in 2024, a next-gen hybrid Xbox in 2028, and Bethesda’s launch schedule. A leaked e-mail revealed Phil Spencer actually desires to purchase Nintendo. There’s additionally phrase of a possible one-hand Xbox controller.
Wesley is the UK Information Editor for IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You may attain Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
