There is one hope for Microsoft however and this comes by way of the backwards compatible cloud.
The Xbox One needs this and it needs it soon. Sony has already started moving in that direction thanks to the PlayStation Now service. You cannot use a disc for the PS4 in the PS3, but you will soon be able to stream from the PS3 to the PS4. Microsoft need to do something similar for the Xbox One, but right now they don’t seem to be delivering and rather than seeing this as a must have, they are thinking of it as just a good idea.
“There are [plans], but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately,” Frank Savage, Xbox development lead, told Kotaku Australia. “It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.”
So Microsoft is taking their own sweet time to make it happen while Sony has it in beta testing already.
One of the biggest issues that Microsoft is faced with is games. This is something that Sony is ahead of in terms of Indie development. At the moment both are sharing the big AAA games however Sony is looking to widen the gap between sales and it is going to be less of a risk for publishers to concentrate on exclusive for the PS4 and perhaps abandon the Xbox One. We could end up seeing the Xbox One suffering the same fate as the Nintendo Wii U. Microsoft and the Xbox One needs to remain competitive and they need a compatibility cloud, and then need it now.
Should they get the cloud up and running before the end of this year, it could help them to remain competitive against Sony. The games library for the Xbox 360 is great and many gamers who own the Xbox One would like to be able to play older games on the next gen console. Should Sony launch their PS Now and Microsoft are still hanging around this could prove to be a disaster for Microsoft. The PS4 will end up being the cheaper of the two consoles, the more powerful and it will allow gamers access to the large library of games from the PS3.
At the moment the fight between the Xbox One and PS4 is clearly being dominated by Sony. Microsoft could catch them up but they need more than the Kinect to do it.
