We’ve gone through an 11 round slug fest, and still don’t have a winner. Both Sony and Microsoft’s gaming consoles have taken their hits, and we are down to the final round to determine a champion. It is with great sadness that this series comes to an end, but this final round is the best yet. We sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed the 9 month ride with us, and stay tuned, we have another ‘Wars’ series beginning soon.
What do you think of the winner? Agree?
A special thank you to LP for making an amazing series of videos.
Console Wars - Finale from Lasse Pulkkinen on Vimeo.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
For Southeast Asia, new price changes.
Prices effective starting May 1st, 2026.
Replies(1)Looks like PlayStation took a hit with Marathon and is now quietly adjusting prices worldwide to recover the losses
Lets be honest raising prices doesn't do that when no one's buying it. I imagine the profit it greater selling 10 times more at a lower price
LMFAO Your comment alone says a lot more about you than anything else. When has one game not selling 10 million copies made a company raise the prices of their console? Then Xbox would be costing $5000 by now lol. You remind of the crazy drug addicts on the street rambling on about conspiracies. xD You sure you don't need a hug, buddy?
One game that Sony payed $200 million for. lol
Also, you sure were quick to get triggered. Maybe your the one who needs a hug?
If nothing else, we should be united against the real issue here. AI and unnecessary tariffs that are effecting all gamers.
The price increases are due to the RAM demand associated with AI and the US-Iran war. You can look to any business news website and local news to see that. Heck, even the 2026 Asus Zenbook Duo I've been eyeing has faced delays and has had a price increase of $400; that laptop has two specs. Asus is doing a staggered release with per-orders for the lower spec now and shipping in May and pre-orders for the higher spec that I'm eyeing starting in June. Basically, all computer manufactures are affected. It'll most likely start affecting smart phones too if it hasn't already. I can't remember the last time any major console maker (Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc) increased the price of their console mid cycle outside of Microsoft just to make more profit.
War is causing gas prices to rise. Transport of everything requires gas so the prices of those items go up as well. So it does have an impact
The blockage of the Straight of Hormuz due to the US-Iran war has affected raw components used in semi-conductor manufacturing such as bromine, aluminum, and helium. Iran had attacked the liquified natural gas (LNG) plant in Qatar which is a large producer (1/3 globally) of helium which is used in semiconductor etching. So it's the both the war and the RAM crises.
Xbox boss Asha Sharma has discussed how component shortages will impact the company's plans for Project Helix.
When does this end? Its killing everyone. Consoles and PC. And for what? AI? The benefits of AI are completely outweighed by the negatives. And the government should have never allowed one company to buy up all the RAM.
This kind of proves this is an after thought product, most products like this are in r&d 5 years before they start mass producing. So they typically have the cost of components and things worked out long before assembly starts.
This is an assumption still, but I wouldn’t be surprised if project helix is similar to Scalebound,perfect dark and sod3. They had an idea but no actual execution other than concept stage. Being impacted by the ram shortage likely would also put this device 3-4 years out.
I’m not even sure MS has that endurance with Xbox yet
I mean.... what?
We're at a point that Samsung wont even provide their own phone department ram because they can sell it at higher prices to 3rd parties (AI). Its more profitable to sell the ram than make their own devices with it.
You think because R&D starts 5 years ago the 3rd party component manufacturers will honour that price? They'll sell it to whomever is paying the most today, not some gentlemens agreement they made years ago. AI farms will buy more volume at higher prices than any console manufacturer will. It'll be the same for Playstation.
Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.
They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.
If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.
It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie
Helix is going to be stupidly expensive
Instead of leaning into smarter upscaling techniques they're brute forcing hardware that will cost them dearly and it remains to be seen if it's genuinely going to provide a meaningful differential
I know in the oc.doace people like to brag about not using frame gen or dlss to get to high on a game but for the majority of players they happily use those technologies without a second thought
That's going to be ps6 vs Helix
While this does seem to be the case, I am encouraged by the statement from Microsoft about wanting to provide affordable options. If this means a Series S style Helix, at least there will be something affordable being offered.
It's called systematic inflationary. Yes we get it Microsoft, keep raising in the name ofall kinds of stuffs
Honestly if there was thing I learned from this generation is that new consoles arnt day one anymore.
I can wait 1-3 years.
Another important lesson from this generation: while Nintendo showed us that prices don't necessarily need to ever drop, we've now learned that waiting 1-3 years does carry some risk that prices increase. This generation is just bizarre in all the wrong ways.
The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.
Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.
Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.
LucasRuinedChildhood,
For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:
1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.
2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".
TechnoBuffalo has done a very great and thorough job with these comparisons from what I've seen. Hats off to them for the mature, detailed, and professional comparisons.
Regarding Sony's inability to multitask with the PS3, I think it's been a matter of legalities. I don't know the technicalities of the system, but I do know from people I've talked to who have a better sense with the industry that MS simply has things like Cross Game Chat and in-game music patented down.
It makes the actual gameplay experience of the Playstation Network underwhelming when you consider the spotty services of in-game music and how long it's taken for Cross Game Chat to come out. But with PSN+ I am expecting to see support for Cross Game Chat-- it costs money to support, and I assume this is why it has exclusivity in some form to + users.
I know in-game music has to do much more strictly with MS holding legal rights to the feature.
Sony does have features like recording gameplay, but the problem I have with Sony is that they are so passive. They leave it to the developers, who in turn frankly don't give a crap to use. What disappoints me is that not even all of Sony's exclusives take advantage of all the features, like in-game music. MAG, and Uncharted 2 being two of them. That's what makes me wonder if it's an issue of hardware limitations.
I'd like to see using the video recorder become much more standard. It's a feature that, IMO, combats Cross Game Chat and is a much better way for Sony to show that they are independent in PSN instead of looking like they are catching up with XBL. I know it takes a lot of memory to do (again, limitations), but perhaps we can see support come for it. Trophies were optional until Sony decided to make it mandatory, and I don't see why they can't push other things like that too. I think this is what they have to do in order to compete with XBL. With guys like EA taking Sony's priority over MS's perhaps we can see that change happen.
The online front is the weakest part of Sony's machine indefinitely. It's the one area MS rightfully exceeded in, as they are indeed a company that has expertise in that division. Sony needs to stop looking so disorganized when it comes to the PSN service and I truly believe PSN+ will help fix that.
As for the comparisons, it still comes to preference. Gamers go both ways-- either they like the 360 exclusives or the PS3 exclusives. None seem to be predominantly superior overall, except the PS3 when it comes to graphics and hardware and the 360 for the online capabilities so far. And Techno's right when they see we likely wont see something like universal in-game music for the PS3, it's simply a patent issue to my knowledge. And despite LIVE's offerings, some people still opt for the PSN service. Despite PS3 being the superior hardware and XBL being the superior service, gamers ultimately decide to their own tastes and reasons.
Uh, how are HIS PSN games installing that slow? If it was as big as, say, Infamous (6.9GB), then I would understand, but he should REALLY look up the system recovery menu if he's installing 200MB that slowly.
Edit: Excellent and compelling review BTW.
I completely agree with TechnoBuffalo on this video except in one point:
I don't see installing a game on PS3 as fail, I really don't mind waitting 5min before starting a fresh bought game, I would even wait an hour and it still wouldn't bother me. And the fact is that installing some games (like GTA4 for example) will lower it's loading time in comparision to Xbox makes it worth it.
Grabs a popcorn....excellent rounds props to L.P from technobuffalo.com
INCOMING TAKE COVER!!!